In rapidly urbanizing areas, small exhauster truck businesses are unable to keep up with the demand for pit latrine emptying services due to inefficiencies in their operations. Thus, when a latrine fills in most low-income urban areas, manual emptiers use buckets to empty the waste and dump it in the environment. This results in high rates of diseases such as cholera and dysentery. Loo Lab enables exhauster trucks to grow their businesses by improving the efficiency and profitability of their daily operations. Loo Lab’s integrated suite of technologies connects truckers to customers, intelligently routes truckers to clusters of customers, and streamlines payments for emptying services. The technology allows individual trucks to save time and money. This makes it possible for exhauster trucks to expand their customer base, empty more low income customers, and prevent waste from being dumped in the environment.
Awards: 2nd Place
Safi Organics
Most fertilizers today are produced in large-scale, capital-intensive units that are mostly located in Europe, China, and the Americas, and then shipped to the emerging markets. Due to the high logistical mark-up, many rural farmers in emerging markets are paying 2-3 times the world price for their fertilizer. Because of their limited income, farmers can often only afford the cheapest, synthetic fertilizer varieties that over the long term actually degrade and acidify their soil. Safi Organics uses technology to downsize and decentralize the fertilizer production process, making it feasible to be implemented profitably in rural villages using locally available resources, labor, and waste. We therefore drastically cut down the logistical cost of conventional fertilizer, and provide farmers access to a higher-quality product. We produce Safi Sarvi, a carbon-negative fertilizer blend that help rural farmers improve their yields by up to 30%.
Ricult
The problem of poverty faced by millions of smallholder farmers in developing countries is largely due to financial exclusion. Due to limited cash to pay upfront, these farmers face difficulties in buying farm inputs (seeds, fertilizers, etc.) at the start of a growing season, resulting in exploitation by informal lenders who charge them over 100-150% APR. Ricult solves the problem through providing high-quality farm inputs to farmers on credit at affordable rates, using an innovative risk assessment mobile platform. Creating a tailored credit score for the farmers through applying advanced machine learning technique to nontraditional data sources, we provide loans at five times lower interest rate than money lenders and offer a repayment schedule that matches the crop cycle. Our pilot market is Pakistan where there are over 20 million farmers facing the problem.
Reach 1600 Foundation
Reach 1600 Foundation provides free, adaptive SAT preparation for students in underserved communities. The organization collects and analyzes data on students’ academic strengths and areas of growth, as well as their psychological assets and needs. Using insights distilled from this data, the SAT curriculum, pedagogical methods, and psychological approaches are customized to each student Reach 1600 interacts with. This personalized approach fosters students’ intrinsic motivation, supporting them to achieve goals beyond the SAT. Students achieved an average score increase of 410 points in 2015 in Reach 1600’s pilot.
CourseExplorer: Helping Students Uncover Hidden Gems
Because of the breadth of departments and courses that Berkeley offers every semester, both undergraduate and graduate students often feel overwhelmed and either make course choices based on word of mouth recommendations or stick with their departmental offerings. Even when students choose to venture outside these academic silos, current tools require students to have specific goals or courses in mind, and as a result, students fall back to making decisions within known boundaries. To provide students with more knowledge and control to shape their academic journey, CourseExplorer is a mobile app that enables both current and prospective students to discover courses, subjects and topics of interest in a more engaging and interactive way. Emulating approaches similar to dating apps, CourseExplorer matches students’ predefined criteria with relevant courses. This encourages exploration and long-term academic engagement and planning.
ARI
Aerial Research Intelligence (ARI) is a service that allows search and rescue personnel to expand their options for locating missing persons in a more efficient manner using drone technology and machine learning capabilities. ARI can be used with any small unmanned aerial system that autonomously searches the area around an initial planning point and quickly processes aerial image data to detect people using a trained neural network. Using RGB and thermal video data from sensors on board the drone platform, ARI is able to determine images and GPS locations that indicate the presence of a missing person, which greatly speeds up the human intensive activity of reviewing footage.
Vitalize
Sepsis is a life-threatening complication caused by an overwhelming immune response to bloodstream infections. However, by recognizing certain vital sign indicators, one can take early action to significantly reduce sepsis-associated mortality. In fact, early sepsis therapy programs using simple, cost-effective treatments have reduced relative risk of sepsis mortality by 45%. Unfortunately, many low resource hospitals are overworked and understaffed, and need more assistance with monitoring at-risk patients. The lack of functional vital signs monitoring equipment further compounds this insufficiency. Consequently, sepsis remains an enormous problem for low resource settings. To address this issue, Team Vitalize is developing a low-cost, wireless vital signs monitoring device that can detect early onset of sepsis and alert the appropriate healthcare provider. This diagnostic tool has the power to save hundreds of thousands of lives and significantly improve quality of care in resource-limited hospitals.
MedServe
MedServe is Teach for America for healthcare. It aims to create a generation of passionate advocates for health equity in every zip code. To do so, it operates a two-year community service fellowship in rural and underserved community primary care for young people between college and medical school. MedServe Fellows are selected for having a spark of interest and high potential for future primary care service. Our Fellows are more likely to come from medically underserved communities than average medical school applicant. During their two years in MedServe, this spark of interest is ignited through a dual role where Fellows spend half of their time gaining vital clinical experience for their future application to graduate school and half of their time conducting community-facing work that shows the impact of high-quality primary care on entire communities. Our organization supports this experience through up-front Fellow training and ongoing professional development support.
Tech+SEAfood
There exists gross demoralizations in the seafood system in the US- 43% of US wild caught seafood is exported, 90% of seafood consumed in the US is imported , 60% of imports being inferior, unstandardized aquaculture, and 30% illegally imported. This project envisions a Tech+SEAfood solution for alternative seafood marketing networks (ASN) to improve efficiency, profitability, communication, and traceability in seafood distribution. Project demand has been researched and vetted with seafood supply chain practitioners. The team aims to improve the timeliness and transparency of supply and demand data as well as improve decision making for mission driven distributors about when, where, and how much seafood should be sold and to whom.