The earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 displaced over one million, and resulted in over 300,000 deaths, including a staggering 18,000 fatalities of highly-skilled professionals. Haiti’s largest public institution of higher learning, the Universite d’Etat d’Haiti (UEH), lost 90% of its physical infrastructure. In a response to the need that arose from this devastation, a group of UC students and faculty organized the UC Haiti Initiative (UCHI) to address the higher education and training needs that is critical to ensure Haiti’s long term success. UCHI believes that partnering directly with UEH students, faculty, and administration is the most promising poverty alleviation strategy that UC, as the world’s greatest institution of higher education, can engage in. UCHI will help train a new generation of leaders, researchers, and policy makers in the arena of global development. UC students and faculty will contribute to the creation of a progressive model of development: engaging an entire campus community in a respectful, sustainable advancement of higher education and community development in a global context, while also assisting in training Haiti’s future leaders and instilling confidence in the international community in a Haitian-led reconstruction process.
The goal of Pedal or Power Project (PPP) is to ease poverty through the proven power of a bicycle to solve transportation problems in developing countries. PPP will fabricate, assemble and distribute bicycles, both motorized and none motorized, in the country of Uganda depending on the need. The bicycle unique ability of having two power sources that can work simultaneously makes it efficient reliable and most important environmental friendly. Motorized bikes will be able to mount simple motors to bicycles or locally made wheelchairs in order to ease mobility for all. PPP is an attempt to solve Africa’s long standing ignored transportation dilemma especially among the poor in remote areas where infrastructure is lacking. For some villages even the limited resources are tens of miles away. These bikes are to be used by children, healthcare workers, and people with disability to more easily access limited resources.
A UC Berkeley student team, along with professor and mentor Laura Mason, will work in Tanzania in July to improve the quality of life of 2,600 people living in the Nyamagongo village of Tanzania, by constructing a rainwater harvesting system at a vocational school, a second brick oven, an improved waste management system incorporating pit latrines, and living quarters for the vocational school staff. The team will collaborate with the African Immigrants’ Social and Cultural Services (AISCS). Their mission is to assist African immigrants in the Bay Area adjust to life in the US as well as the people of Tanzania and other African countries with education, vocational training, medical services, and community organization. This project will ultimately increase water availability, food security, crop production, gender empowerment, economic development and significantly alleviate poverty.
The UC Berkeley student chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) will partner with the Appropriate Technology Design Team (ATDT) of the San Francisco Professional chapter of EWB to develop a simple and scalable solution to the recycling and reusing of plastic bottles as building material. With the mission of empowering communities by providing tools that facilitate local economic development and provide basic needs, ATDT will work with the community in San Juayua/Juan de Dios, El Salvador to utilize discarded waste products, primarily plastic bottles, for non-structural construction materials. The project aims to design, create, test and deploy a manual recycling system to the community with instructions for local manufacture, operation, and maintenance. The community will benefit from both the reduction in the solid waste pollution and by introducing a new source of construction materials to insulate dwellings from rain, wind and heat.
Nearly 25% of the world’s population still burns the midnight oil after sunset. Another 20% gets fortunate only for a few hours a day or several times a week when the grid to their houses finally carries power. The lack of electricity is not only a strong impeding force against development that prevents people from getting access to modern communication and other resources, it deprives them of very basic amenities like education, lighting and healthcare. This project will work towards creating ultra affordable electricity access for the 2.6 billion underserved people in the world by implementing a novel technology combined with innovative distribution channels and financial schemes.
MobileWorks provides a platform that gives underemployed and impoverished individuals in the developing world the ability to earn supplemental income by doing work through their mobile phones. The organization accepts data entry and transcription contracts from a variety of sources–government programs in India, Western crowdsourcing companies, and traditional outsourcing companies–and sends this work to workers’ phones over a locally-accessible interface, handling payment to workers and guaranteeing quality to companies. Over time, MobileWorks users have the opportunity to earn data entry certifications and lift themselves out of poverty.
Every year, groups of Mexican migrants in the US pool their resources to sponsor thousands of development projects in their Mexican hometowns. Unfortunately, the positive impact that these projects have on towns in Mexico has been limited. Due to the complexities involved in designing, fundraising and overseeing implementation, many locally based projects often fail. This Fund will help to change that by empowering migrants in multiple ways. By allowing migrants to leverage their collective remittances, they will be able to transform their migrant expelling communities in Mexico into ones that offer their citizens access to education, health, economic opportunities, gender equality and a sustainable environment.
Teach for Health is a non-profit organization founded in 2009 by UCSF students of medicine, nursing, and pharmacy, and a Berkeley MPH graduate. Teach for Health’s (TFH) mission is to train communities in program planning and leadership to improve health and well-being. Currently, Teach for Health in Nicaragua has 43 health promoters in 18 communities educating residents about health-related issues and working to expand healthcare in these communities. Funding will allow Teach for Health to evaluate, improve and expand on the work it has been doing in Nicaragua. Teach for Health will develop measures to evaluate the impact that it has had on the communities in which the program is active. This will allow Teach for Health to improve its services and its approach as it continues to expand its program. Teach for Health also plans to expand on its current offerings by partnering with several local institutions to develop a disaster response plan for participating communities.
Many students who died during the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech tried to text 9-1-1 for help, but their messages were never received because police departments did not have the technology to receive text reports. Crime Fighter is a technology that revolutionizes the way we report crime. Crime Fighter is the first mobile technology that allows users to be completely anonymous and report crimes in less than two minutes for any situation using a text-based application for all smartphones. The technology includes the mobile application for general users and a software system for the police department and university safety services. Currently, no comparable product exists in the market, enabling Crime Fighter to lead the path to a safer community by using the modern and popular technology of texting.
