Time is ticking for University of California students to submit their world-changing concepts to Big Ideas@Berkeley, one of the nation’s oldest and most international student innovation competitions.
Blum Center News
Time is ticking for University of California students to submit their world-changing concepts to Big Ideas@Berkeley, one of the nation’s oldest and most international student innovation competitions.
Big Ideas’ mission is not only to identify and award promising student innovations, but also to support multidisciplinary teams through a multi-stage, yearlong process. Expanded advising drop-in hours and remote appointments are available with Big Ideas advisors through November 12, from 9 am to 4 pm, in order to help students with their pre-proposals.
For many student innovators, Big Ideas has served as the first step in turning a grand hunch into a viable proposal. Last year, Amelia Phillips and her Big Ideas team won the first place award in the Conflict & Development category for the Somo Project — a socially focused, non-profit venture capital investment firm that works to identify, train, fund and mentor entrepreneurs looking to drive social change. Phillips credits the process of competing in Big Ideas and the resources available to students as critical elements in getting her project off the ground. “More important than just funding, Big Ideas@Berkeley opened up a community that has been and continues to be vital to growing The Somo Project,” says Phillips. “Through advising from the Big Ideas team, I have improved the way in which I describe what we do and how we plan to develop and grow the organization’s impact.”
Since 2006, the contest has provided support to student teams who have gone on to secure over $55 million in additional funding for their for-profit, nonprofit, or hybrid ventures. Innovations and enterprises seeded by Big Ideas include: Cellscope, which turns the camera of a mobile phone or tablet computer into a high-quality light microscope; the Cal Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty now pushing to achieve carbon neutrality on campus by 2025; Captricity, which sells data capture software to digitize hand-written forms; and Back to the Roots, which creates sustainable food products from coffee grounds and other food waste.
“This contest is multidisciplinary and high touch,” said Phillip Denny, manager of the Big Ideas Contest. “It challenges students to step outside of their traditional university-based academic work, take a risk, and use their education, passion, and skills to work on problems important to them.”
For more information on the Big Ideas contest:
Website: bigideascontest.org
Email: bigideas [at] berkeley [dot] edu
Sanitation and the removal of human waste are among the biggest environmental health issues of our time. According to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 70 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa lacks access to adequate sanitation.
By Sybil Lewis
Sanitation and the removal of human waste are among the biggest environmental health issues of our time. According to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 70 percent of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa lacks access to adequate sanitation—and in Kenya, sanitation coverage is available to only 41 percent of the country, largely because the government cannot afford or is not incentivized to cover the high costs of building pipes and sewage treatment plants in low-income areas. This leads to open defecation, fecal contaminated water, and disease.
To deal with this crisis, many non-governmental organizations are trying to come up with affordable and sustainable toilet solutions. One UC Berkeley student team and Big Ideas@Berkeley winner has been working in Kenya not just to increase sanitation services but to turn human waste into an energy solution—what they call “turning poo to power.”
Appropriately named Feces to Fuel, the four-member Cal team has been collaborating with Sanivation, a UC Berkeley- and Kenya-based organization that provides in-home toilets and waste collection services. Feces to Fuel’s plan is to collect fecal waste from Sanivation’s facility in Naivasha, Kenya and turn it into charcoal briquettes that can be sold at an affordable price and used as cooking oil.
Briquettes: Briquettes made in summer 2015 by the Feces to Fuel team in Naivasha, Kenya.
According to Catherine Berner, a UC Berkeley graduate and member of the Feces to Fuel team, the creation of charcoal briquettes addresses another major issue affecting low-income populations in Kenya and throughout East Africa—the financial, environmental, and health costs associated with using traditional forms of cooking oil.
Berner, who majored in Environmental Engineering Science, explains that in many semi-urban and urban communities in Kenya the only available and affordable fuel sources are wood and charcoal, which have become increasingly unaffordable. Over the past decade, energy prices in Kenya have increased five-fold, and in Naivasha families are spending over 30 percent of their income on cooking fuel, hindering their ability to move out of poverty. Furthermore, burning crude forms of energy produces hazardous gasses, which are harmful not only to the environment but lead to serious health problems—more than half the deaths of children worldwide under age five are due to inhaling household air pollution.
Sanivation and Feces to Fuel have combined these seemingly unrelated problems to create a solution that both improves sanitation services and provides affordable fuel for low-income families.
But the enterprise is still very young. Sanivation launched its sanitation services in only September 2014. From its facilities in Naivasha, the social enterprise has been installing free in-home toilets, called Blue Boxes, for a $7 monthly subscription that includes twice weekly waste collection. In its first four months of operation, Sanivation signed up 57 customers for its in-home toilet and has maintained a 98 percent re-subscription rate. It aims to reach a million users by 2020.
Also over the past year, Sanivation has expanded its business model to turn the collected waste into energy, which is where Feces to Fuel comes in. Feces to Fuel is helping Sanivation identify and implement the best technology and method to transform human waste into a reliable fuel source. The project—which includes Cal students Emily Woods, Ken Lim, and Fiona Gutierrez-Dewar—is funded largely by an $8,000 prize from the 2015 Big Ideas@Berkeley competition in the Clean & Sustainable Energy Alternatives category.
Blue Box: Sanivation installs in-home toilets, called the Blue Box, which have a dry urine diverting system. The waste from the toilets is collected every two weeks
“Before collaborating with Feces to Fuel, Sanivation was using solar concentrators to heat up the feces because their original plan was to turn waste into fertilizer, yet people were asking if they could use it to cook food,” said Berner. “Sanivation replied no because it was not safe yet, but what they realized is that there is a huge need for fuel created from treated feces.”
Andrew Foote and Emily Woods, the founders of Sanivation who developed their model while undergraduate students at Georgia Institute of Technology, said they have spent the past four years trying to figure out a reliable method of sanitizing feces using solar energy. Woods is now a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley and Foote works fulltime on Sanivation.
In 2014, Sanivation started to develop a process that combines two waste forms—agricultural and human—to produce biomass-based briquettes for use in household stoves. The team now collects rose waste from surrounding flower farms, which otherwise would be burnt or discarded, and carbonizes the waste to create an energy dense charcoal dust. The rose waste biomass is then combined with human feces, collected from Sanivation’s in-home toilets, and heated up with solar concentrators to inactivate all pathogens, rendering the feces safe for use. The mixture of rose waste and feces is then placed in a machine, which turns the mixture into small briquettes.
According to Berner, the briquettes sold in Kenya are usually made with local organic waste or charcoal dust from traditional charcoal with trash-slurry as the binder. This combination produces little energy and lots of smoke, making it difficult to compete with charcoal. Whereas the energy-dense rose waste and high calorific value of feces used by Sanivation and Feces to Fuel produces briquettes that emit less smoke and burn longer than traditional biomass briquettes.
Cooking: The feces and rose waste combination produces briquettes that emit less smoke and burn longer than traditional biomass briquettes, which are made out of trash-slurry and organic matter.
“Around the world and specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa, a lot of people are working on carbonizing agricultural waste into fuel and reusing feces for fuel,” said Woods. “We are carbonizing rose waste and using feces as the binder, which has never been done before.”
Other feces-to-fuel efforts have turned human waste into biogas, biodiesel, and fertilizer. Notable examples include the feces-biogas powered bus in the U.K and bio centers in Kenyan slums, which turn feces into biogas to power public showers. No other method, however, has used human feces to make briquettes for cooking.
While the number of feces-to-fuel innovations is growing, there is still a lack of research on the composition of feces and its potential for fuel. To develop its model, Sanivation relied on the work of few research organizations, such as the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).
“I think that there is little research on the composition of feces, largely because of social stigma,” Berner said. “Human waste is just seen as that, waste, and not as a resource. For our model to work, we must find and show the value of waste.”
Sanivation conducted a beta test in mid 2014, in which 2,000 kg of briquettes were tested by families in Naivasha and the Kakuma refugee camp, along with small businesses and some industrial settings, to determine the best markets. Feedback from the beta test showed high customer satisfaction with the quality of the fuel; it also revealed that people are not uncomfortable with the idea of cooking with materials made with human feces. This is attributable to the fact that the briquettes do not look or smell like feces, said Berner.
Further analysis from the beta test showed that small businesses, such as hospitals and schools, are the key group for Sanivation to target, because they can provide consistent, mid-size orders, said Berner. However, Sanivation plans to continue working on sanitation in refugee camps in East Africa. The social enterprise received funding from the CDC’s Innovation Fund to design a system in the Kakuma Refugee Camp on the Kenya-South Sudan border. As part of the pilot for the toilet implementation, 30 families in the refugee camp tested their briquettes over a period of eight weeks.
During the summer of 2015, Feces to Fuel focused on improving the quality and manufacturing capability of the briquettes. In Naivasha, Woods, Berner, and Gutierrez-Dewar, implemented the Adam Retort, a carbonizer with high-energy efficiency and low pollution, which has been producing over 300 kgs of charcoal dust per week, according to Berner. The Berkeley team also helped Sanivation build out their waste treatment site and a greenhouse to study the potential of making fuel from dry waste.
Catherine: Catherine Berner working with the Sanivation team in Kenya to implement a process that created consistent briquettes.
Meanwhile in the U.S., Ken Lim, a UC Berkeley junior and member of the Feces to Fuel team, conducted research at MIT with experts in the briquette and charcoal field. Sanivation’s feces treatment method had already been proven to be safe for human use by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention; Lim’s role at MIT was to conduct more research to understand the composition of feces and its potential for fuel. The team is currently conducting further research on its briquettes at the Chemisense lab.
One of Sanivation’s main aspirations is to improve environmental health. If its briquettes can be sold at 60 percent the cost of charcoal, Woods said they will reduce the demand for traditional charcoal, offsetting the industry’s environmental impact that has left Kenya with 5 percent of its historic forest cover and contributed to climate change.
“We estimate that each ton of our briquettes saves 88 trees from deforestation,” said Berner. “Briquetting is taking off in Kenya. If we are able to prove our model, it will bring more attention to the briquetting industry and help replace the large demand for unsustainable charcoal.”
In May 2015, Cristobal Madero, a Chilean native and PhD student in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, invited 14 of Chile’s most elite high schools to participate in a novel educational experiment.
By Nicholas Bobadilla
In May 2015, Cristobal Madero, a Chilean native and PhD student in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, invited 14 of Chile’s most elite high schools to participate in a novel educational experiment.
The motivation for the experiment was simple: to mitigate tensions between Chilean citizens and the Mapuche, a group indigenous to the country for 12,000 years. But the method was less straightforward: send high schools teachers to meet with Mapuche communities, so that the educators could bring back accurate information to their students—who are destined to become Chile’s leaders and will likely control the fate of this long maligned, and increasingly impoverished, group.
“The conflict between the Chilean state and Mapuche people has been in place for 500 years,” said Madero. “My question was: How is it possible that this problem is still there?”
In April 2015, Madero founded an educational organization called Kuy Kuitin, which means “building bridges” in the Mapuche dialect. To expand his idea, Madero entered Kuy Kuitin in the Big Ideas@Berkeley contest with Daniel Cano, a PhD candidate in history at Georgetown University whose research focuses on indigenous education in Chile and who also has a personal connection with the Mapuche people. A second place win in the 2015 Conflict & Development category enabled them to set their educational plan in motion.
“During the proposal process, Big Ideas contacted a sociologist specializing in Mapuche culture,” said Madero. “That was the key to going deeper and making the idea more realistic and rooted in the evidence and theory of multicultural education.”
Kuy Kuitin recently recruited five history teachers from the wealthiest schools in Santiago to shadow teachers in Mapuche schools for 10 days in April 2016. In addition to participating in activities within the Mapuche schools, the Santiago teachers will spend time with Mapuche families. Following the immersion, the teachers will incorporate information about Mapuche culture and history into their lessons and formally disseminate the information among their colleagues. Their students will later be surveyed to gauge the impact of the new curriculum.
Madero became familiar with the Mapuche and their history while in college, when he joined the Jesuits, a religious order within the Catholic Church known for dedication to service and social justice. In 2003, he took a two-week assignment with the Jesuits to acquaint himself with the culture and history of the indigenous group. He felt so activated by the experience that he has returned to learn from the Mapuche over the past 12 years, while working as a high school teacher throughout Chile, a master’s student in theology at Boston College, and most recently as a doctoral student in education at UC Berkeley.
“I developed relationships with two families that made me realize how the Mapuche people are treated and received,” said Madero in response to why he started develop his educational program. “That’s one side of the answer. It was personal.”
The other reason was grounded in Madero’s resolve to mitigate the ongoing conflict between the Mapuche and broader Chilean society. “I thought education would be a key to understanding and overcoming the problem.”
Madero said that Kuy Kuitin is targeting the wealthiest schools because in Chile the top earners control the country. “We don’t need to conduct research to know if wealthy people in Chile own all the mass media, own the forestry industry, have written the history of the country, have led the country… That’s a reality,” said Madero.
More specifically, the wealthiest students are most likely to assume the top political and corporate positions in the country, and as a result will have a hand in the Mapuche’s fate. In providing an alternate history, Kuy Kuitin aims to influence those who will be responsible for the social and economic future of the Mapuche and broader Chilean society.
The Mapuche have been the subject of violent and legislative displacement since the arrival of Spanish settlers in the 16th century. In 1881, the Chilean government seized 90 percent of Mapuche territory and moved the natives onto reservations. In recent decades, forestry companies have destroyed their land and jeopardized their agricultural livelihood through commercial tree farming. As a result, many Mapuche have migrated to urban areas, where they take low-paying jobs and are forced to the margins of society. They suffer from unemployment and illiteracy, which create stigmas of laziness and incompetence and result in various forms of discrimination.
Radical as well as peaceful Mapuche groups have protested maltreatment, only to be met by excessive police brutality and discriminatory anti-terrorism laws. Complicit in their plight is the mass media, which has extrapolated the behavior of a radical minority to the entire Mapuche population.
“Because of the power a teacher has in a classroom, we might be able to convey that the Mapuche are not lazy, drunk, dark people who don’t like to work and that’s why they’re all poor. All those categories students in wealthy schools receive, they’re reproduced and they don’t do anything to overcome this,” argued Madero. “Maybe a teacher can be a good mediator of change.”
Although the project has proven controversial for students whose families have been responsible for the oppression of the Mapuche, Madero admits the reception by many of the schools exceeded his and Cano’s expectations.
“In Santiago, we invited 14 schools and received answers from six of the them. It was risky because we are telling them, ‘You are our target for this reason [wealth].’ But those six schools got the message and they really understand and want to make a change.”
The project was also well received by the other side. “The Mapuche have been very welcoming and allowed us to go beyond what we were expecting,” said Madero. They have invited the teachers on trips to museums and other Mapuche landmarks.
Nevertheless, Madero is aware that such a small project cannot transform centuries of discrimination. He sees education as a “starting point,” and a means to convince the Chilean elite that most Mapuche are not violent. “There is violence and an extremist group using force,” he said, “but 99 percent live peacefully.”
During the second half of the project, the high school teachers will design and submit a training manual to the Teacher Training and Experimentation Center of the Ministry of Education. They will also publish academic papers, write articles for local and national newspapers, and communicate their experiences via social media. A documentary filmmaker has expressed interest in capturing the project. The final stage of Kuy Kuitin will entail submitting a proposal to the Intercultural Education Department of the Chilean Ministry of Education to amend school curriculums. In the end, Madero hopes the government will implement affirmative action policies to ensure fairer access to housing, education, and employment for the Mapuche.
Education is not a panacea for the conflict in Chile, but Madero is confident about the impact Kuy Kuitin can have, and hopes the organization will serve as a starting point for lasting change.
“I’m convinced education can be a good tool, not the only one, 0to overcome a lot of social problems and conflicts. That’s a belief.”
Big Ideas winner and UC Santa Cruz graduate student Dustin Adams, who works in UC Santa Cruz’s Interactive Systems for Individuals with Special Needs lab, designed tool to recognize and describe photos.
Despite India’s robust government immunization program—which provides 11 different vaccinations free of cost—immunization rates remain low, particularly among poor populations.
By Sybil Lewis
Despite India’s robust government immunization program—which provides 11 different vaccinations free of cost—immunization rates remain low, particularly among poor populations. According to a 2015 University of Michigan study, only 57 percent of children younger than three in India are fully vaccinated. A nationwide survey conducted by UNICEF in 2009 found that many children are not fully immunized because their mothers and caretakers did not understand the vaccines, did not know where to get them, did not feel they were needed, or found vaccines shortages at health clinics.
With this in mind, three UC Berkeley MBA students— Anandamoy Sen, Erik Krogh-Jespersen, and Sanat Kamal Bahl—and Julia Walsh, a Cal professor of maternal and child health and international health, began in 2012 to rethink potential solutions. The team decided that the Indian vaccine deficit was due not to lack of supply, but to an information problem—and could best be addressed through a cellular vaccination tracking technology, which they called Emmunify.
“When we looked at household surveys in Uttar Pradesh that asked why children were not getting vaccinated, we found the major problems were the families didn’t know the importance of them, didn’t know when they were supposed to go, and when they did go there were tremendously long wait times and possibly no vaccines,” said Professor Walsh, co-founder of Emmunify. “So when a mother does a mental cost-benefit analysis of waiting to get the vaccination or working for a day, she does not see the benefit of the vaccine.”
Another challenge to universal immunization is the paper record keeping system in India; records are often easily misplaced, resulting in missed or duplicated vaccinations. The most recent National Family Health Survey in India found that only 38 percent of mothers were able to show their child’s vaccination card.
To address these challenges, Emmunify plans to provide a portable electronic medical record that digitizes and stores immunization records, replacing cumbersome paper records. It also plans to send SMS reminders to families about when their next vaccinations are due and where they are available.
Emmunify got its start through the UC Berkeley’s 2012 Hacking Health competition, which awarded Sen, Krogh-Jespersen, and Bahl the grand prize of $2,000 to build a prototype. With Walsh as their faculty adviser, the team then won first place in the 2013 Big Ideas@Berkeley competition in the maternal and child health category and used the $8,000 award money to send two team members to the New Delhi slums in July 2013 to test Emmunify’s usability and feasibility. By partnering with Aarushi Charitable Trust, an organization of community health workers in the New Delhi slums, Emmunify was able to conduct stakeholder interviews with health workers and focus groups with mothers.
The Emmunify team aims to implement a multi-step process. First, a village health worker would use a portable, battery-powered tablet with Emmunify’s software to register a family’s health information and assign each family an ID number, which is programmed onto a portable chip (RFID tag) placed on the family’s phone. Once the family is registered, it will receive SMS or voicemail reminders about upcoming child vaccinations. When the family arrives at the clinic, its RFID tag will be scanned to confirm and update immunization records, preventing duplication. The final step is to store the health information from the tablet onto the Cloud, where an application will generate and send future automated messages.
Anandamoy Sen, Emmunify’s co-founder and mobile technology professional, said the organization’s main innovation is its adaptability to India’s rural health context. He noted there have been other prototypes of electronic record vaccination systems, but they require a Wi-Fi connection, which is scarce in rural villages, and use bulkier hardware that is easily damaged. What sets Emmunify apart, he said, is its offline design. An Internet connection is used only to send information to the Cloud; during the registration and vaccination process, no Internet, phone service, or electricity is required.
Much of what Emmunify aims to do is enabled by India’s robust mobile phone market. According to a 2010 UN report, for every 100 people there are approximately 45 cell phones. Emmunify can rely on SMS reminders because the RFID tag placed on families’ phones is designed to operate on any type of mobile.
Emmunify may be attractive to health care providers due to its simplicity and cost effectiveness.
“Paper [vaccination] cards are estimated to cost about a US$1.25 per child, whereas the tag is inexpensive, costing US$0.25-0.50 each,” said Professor Walsh. “We also can buy consoles and tablets for the health workers at less than US$100 each.”
Walsh noted that developing the necessary software and cloud analytics is the most challenging and costly aspect of Emmunify’s technology. The software—the tablet-chip interface, the tablet-cloud interface and cloud analytics, and the automated family reminders—will be interconnected. To date, the team has completed the RFID tag and has progressed with the user-interface for the health workers console. But they are still working on the Cloud-console software and analytics.
The potential impact of a technology like Emmunify extends beyond the health benefits of vaccinations. “If you are fully vaccinated, you will be better nourished, do better in school, stay in school longer, and have the chance to get out of poverty,” Walsh said. “We estimate that in places like the New Delhi slums and the poor populations of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, if you vaccinate an additional hundred kids, you save two lives.”
In the long run, Sen said health information stored in the Cloud could help health clinics forecast supply and demand for vaccinations, preventing shortages that have deterred mothers from getting their children vaccinated.
The Emmunify team has always known that cooperation with and buy-in from the Indian government is essential. The government plays a large role in the administration of vaccinations through its Universal Immunization Programme, which since 1978 has provided vaccinations of preventable, yet life-threatening, conditions to children free of charge.
In October 2010, the Indian government implemented a voluntary Universal ID program (UID), which stores citizens’ biometric data and assigns them a unique identity number, with the goal of improving and reducing corruption in the distribution of public services. Emmunify does not plan to integrate with the UID program because, said Sen, many rural clinics do not have the scanning technology to obtain biometric UID data and the UID program does not include the vaccination reminder software. However, Emmunify may use the national ID as a verification method for families’ RFID tags.
Next steps for Emmunify include registering as a nonprofit and pilot testing. Emmunify recently won third place in the 2015 BigIdeas @ Berkeley Scaling Up competition, receiving a $5,000 award that will help the team test all of Emmunify’s technology—from the chip to the SMS reminders—with families in the New Delhi slums in early 2016.
Emmunify’s technology may not be limited to India. Walsh said Emmunify is working closely with DHIS 2, an open source information system functional in 30 countries, including eight Indian states. Once the pilot test is complete, Emmunify plans to adapt its software to be compatible with DHIS, allowing for the possibility of expansion into other countries.
When the Big Ideas student innovation contest launched 10 years ago, it was a novel concept: give teams of students with potential breakthrough ideas small sums of money and a variety of supports and see what happens. Over the past decade, a lot has happened.
When the Big Ideas student innovation contest launched 10 years ago, it was a novel concept: give teams of students with potential breakthrough ideas small sums of money and a variety of supports and see what happens. Over the past decade, a lot has happened.
Big Ideas has gone on to seed scores of high impact projects—from the Cellscope, which turns the camera of a mobile phone or tablet computer into a high-quality light microscope, to the Cal Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty now pushing to achieve carbon neutrality on campus by 2025. The contest has jump-started successful companies like Captricity, which sells data capture software to digitize hand-written forms, and Back to the Roots, which creates sustainable food products from coffee grounds and other food waste. It has also given the first precious funds to nonprofits like We Care Solar, which provides solar-powered suitcases for use in maternity hospitals and clinics, and Acopio, a supply chain information platform for Latin American coffee farmers.
For many student innovators, Big Ideas served as the first step in turning a grand hunch into a viable proposal. Since 2006, the contest has provided support to student teams who have gone on to secure over $55 million in additional funding for their for profit, nonprofit, or hybrid ventures.
This year’s contest launches September 8. It will provide up to $300,000 in awards, and will build on a well-honed tradition of coaching teams through eight months of pre-proposals, mentorship, and final submissions. The tenth anniversary contest will also provide more competition categories to more students. Contestants will be able to submit their ideas to the newly introduced “Financial Inclusion” category and the newly extended “Energy & Resource Alternatives” category, sponsored by the University of California Carbon Neutrality Initiative.
As the contest enters its tenth year, its reach encompasses 18 universities, including the entire University of California system and the USAID Higher Education Solutions Network, as well as 650,000 students—making the Big Ideas Contest one of the largest student innovation competitions in the world.
“When I first got involved as Big Ideas judge in 2006, the contest was a campus-based competition open to 30,000 UC Berkeley students,” said Phillip Denny, who manages the contest on behalf of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. “Now the contest is open to a population equivalent to a medium-sized U.S. city. The results in terms of the creativity of ideas and social impact really show.”
From September to March, when the final proposals are due, teams have the opportunity to attend information sessions, idea generation and networking events, writing workshops, editing blitzes, and office hours with Big Ideas advisors in person and online. In addition, finalist teams will be matched with mentors with expertise relevant to their project from a range of social enterprises, academic institutions, nonprofits, and businesses.
Unlike many business competitions, Big Ideas is multidisciplinary — attracting engineers, science majors, public health majors, as well as MBA students — and is focused on supporting a variety of social ventures including for-profit enterprises, non-profit organizations and community-based initiatives. The contest challenges students to step outside of their traditional university-based academic work, take a risk, and use their education, passion, and skills to work on problems important to them.
For more information about rules, categories, resources, funding, and contact information, please visit the Big Ideas website at http://bigideascontest.org
Prompted by funding and recognition from the Big Ideas@Berkeley contest, a group of Cal students headed by Mechanical Engineering graduate student Julia Kramer is seeking to establish a sustainable training program called “Visualize” for midwives in Ghana.
By Carlo David
Prompted by funding and recognition from the Big Ideas@Berkeley contest, a group of Cal students headed by Mechanical Engineering graduate student Julia Kramer is seeking to establish a sustainable training program called “Visualize” for midwives in Ghana. In a country where only five percent of women have been screened for cervical cancer, Visualize aims to create a system in which midwives receive the essential skills and tools to perform a visual inspection of the cervix with acetic acid (vinegar). The inspection method, known as VIA, is a low-cost and effective way to screen for cervical cancer, but it is not widely used in Ghana and other countries due to a lack of training and awareness.
Julia Kramer and Maria Young pioneered the VIA training program in Kumasi and Accra, Ghana in June 2013.
Kramer and Maria Young first conceived of the project as undergraduates at the University of Michigan. “We were part of a group of five engineering students who spent eight weeks in Ghana for a cultural immersion and design ethnography experience,” said Kramer.
At Michigan, she and her collaborators developed the first few prototypes of a VIA training simulator, based on design requirements they developed at two major teaching hospitals in Ghana. At Berkeley, Kramer teamed up with fellow Mechanical Engineering and Haas School of Business students Abhimanyu Ray, Karan Patel, and Betsy McCormick, to develop the midwife VIA training concept. Visualize’s faculty advisors include public health professional Kyle Fliflet and Mechanical Engineering Professor Alice Agogino, who is chair of the Development Engineering graduate group.
Kramer explains that her project was motivated largely by interactions with midwives, nurses, and doctors in Ghana, along with substantial data supporting the need for more cervical cancer screening. Annually and worldwide, 275,000 women die from cervical cancer. Eighty percent of deaths occur in developing countries, which often do not have the medical infrastructure to diagnose and treat cervical cancer. VIA has been proven to serve as a low-cost alternative to methods like the Pap smear. A 2008 International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics study found that VIA could reduce mortality rates by 68 percent. Through midwife-administered VIA tests and subsequent treatments, the Visualize team estimates it can avert 150,000 deaths per year.
Based on their experiences in Ghana, Kramer and her colleagues believe midwives, rather than doctors or other medical professionals, are the best means to implement their public health solution. “Midwives have and can be trained for this procedure,” said Agogino. “As a matter of fact, because such an intimate procedure requires interpersonal communication skills, midwives are better suited than licensed medical doctors.”
The VIA method is not only cheaper than a Pap smear—if properly performed, it also can be equally effective. The method works as follows: a midwife performs a preliminary pelvic examination; she inspects any pre-existing abnormalities; she applies a small amount of table vinegar in the cervix; if acetowhite lesions appear, cancerous cells may be at work.
A Ghanaian midwife holds a visual aid of the cervix.
If there are signs of pre-cancerous cells, the midwife may perform cryotherapy, a procedure that freezes off cervical abnormalities and eradicates cancer cells. In a 15-year controlled trial of 151,000 women ages 35-64 in Mumbai, India, the mortality rate in the cryotherapy treatment group was reduced by 31 percent.
There are, however, unique challenges and financial hurdles to implementing Visualize. According to Agogino, “One of the biggest challenges is identifying infrastructures that already exist for training midwives, so the midwives can eventually train other women in Ghana.” Indeed, the Visualize team is exploring whether it is viable to incentivize women to recruit and train other women, particularly to reach remote areas.
Communication may also be a challenge for Kramer and her team. “There’s an ever-present challenge of working in a culture I’m not part of,” explained Kramer. “It’s hard to travel back and forth to Ghana and it’s difficult to bridge the communication gap using email or Skype.”
A group of Ghanaian women undergoing training with the use of a box that serves as a replica for the VIA training simulator.
Kramer and her colleagues also must walk a fine line between American and Ghanaian public health and other cultures. “Since one of the main goals of this project is empowerment, we want to remain very careful about overstepping our bounds and ensuring mutual respect,” explained Kramer.
The Visualize team plans to use various media—television, radio, billboards—to market the availability of midwives for cervical cancer screenings. In addition, the team is collaborating with the Ghana Ministry of Health and Ghana Health Services to vet and publicize its efforts. So far, response from Ghanaian government agencies has been positive. Visualize has found several partners, including the Kumasi Nurses and Midwifery and Training College and the Ministry of Health. Its next step is to identify the location of its first training program.
Ultimately, Kramer said her project is about respectfully furthering social change. “Young people can and should take a more active role in addressing conditions of global poverty,” she said. “But we have to be humble and realistic about our role in societal progress. We have to respect cultural traditions and boundaries and be aware that our presence carries connotations beyond our control.”
The project will be running a fundraising campaign from September 14 until October 14. For more information, go here:crowdfund.berkeley.edu/visualize.
On May 5, the Blum Center celebrated the eight-month journey that was the 2014-2015 Big Ideas@Berkeley student innovation contest with an awards celebration recognizing 46 winning projects for social change.
By Sybil Lewis
Aileen Suzara presents Bahay Kubo: Kitchen Gardens of Living Tradition at the Big Ideas 2015 Grand Prize Pitch Day
On May 5, the Blum Center celebrated the eight-month journey that was the 2014-2015 Big Ideas@Berkeley student innovation contest with an awards celebration recognizing 46 winning projects for social change.
This year, the contest received a record number of applications from 201 teams representing over 700 students across nine UC campuses and 17 other universities. The teams presented hundreds of innovative ideas to address today’s most pressing issues—from the need for financial literacy among U.S. students facing college debt to the best way to produce sustainable energy in rural Kenya.
Addressing a packed auditorium at Blum Hall, Big Ideas Program Manager Phillip Denny said: “I hope that what contest winners will gain from Big Ideas today and going forward is four things: inspiration, support, funding, and validation.”
Students at the event could be seen smiling and nodding. “During our project design, our mentor—an international development expert—helped us a lot in thinking about how to devise a sustainable model that would actually scale,” said Linlin Liang from Michigan State University, who worked on the the m-Omulimisa SMS Services project, which shared first place in the Food System Innovations category and provides agricultural support to farmers in Uganda through mobile technology.
The other first place winner was Bahay Kubo, a UC Berkeley team that revitalizes Filipino food and culture to promote health through the creation of a culturally based garden and culinary arts program.
This year’s contest categories included Clean & Sustainable Energy Alternatives, Conflict & Development, Creative Expression for Social Justice, Food Systems Innovations, Global Health, Improving Student Life, Information Technology for Society, Mobiles for Reading, Open Data for Development, and Scaling Up Big Ideas.
Students not only spend hundreds of hours researching social impact solutions—they also learn to refine and, as important, sell them. “The presentations were inspiring,” said Christie Vilsack, senior advisor for international education at USAID who served as a judge for the Global Impact Category. “They were all very poised and eager to take advice and answer questions.”
Among this year’s first place winners were BCAPI, a team of five UC Berkeley undergraduates who are developing a software and hardware package to help people with physical disabilities better drive wheelchairs, write, and communicate. BCAPI’s technology relies on advancements in Brain-Computer Interfacing. The BCAPI team won the $8,500 first place prize in the IT for Society category as well as $5,000 from the Campus and Community Impact Pitch competition that took place on April 28.
Other double awardees included the UC Davis team Clean Water for Crops, which seeks to implement a water cleaning system in Guatemala using sand filtration and a local Maringa seed to treat the contaminated water of Lake Atitlan. Clean Water for Crops team members emphasized that an important part of their idea was not just the ease of use of the technology, but the community engagement process.
“Our mentor Khalid Kadir made us think about the political and community impact of the work—and that the technology is the easy part, while ensuring community involvement is a lot harder and crucial to sustainability,” said Kyle Fuller, one of the graduate student team members.
Fuller, like many who have competed for and won Big Ideas, see their experience as the beginning of a lifelong quest to scale this or another social impact project. Over the past nine years, Big Ideas participants have gone on to secure over $45 million in additional funding—and dozens of projects have emerged as successful and sustainable for- and non-profits.
“I have one simple message,” said Lina Nilsson, innovation director at the Blum Center and project mentor to some of the teams. “This is not the final step. Continue to show people your ideas and know that you can continue to rely on us a resource to talk through the inevitable challenges ahead.”
2015 Grand Prize Pitch Day Winners: CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY IMPACT PITCH 1st Place:BCAPI(UC Berkeley): BCAPI is developing a powerful software and hardware package that will enable technology developers and researchers to create a range of Brain Computer Interfacing (BCI) technologies to assist people with physical disabilities who lack control of their bodies but still control their minds. 2nd Place: Bahay Kubo – Gardens of Living Tradition(UC Berkeley): Bahay Kubo (“Little House”) revitalizes Filipino food and culture to promote health through the creation of a culturally-based garden and culinary arts program. Bahay Kubo’s purpose is to lift up sustainable, healthy Filipino food practices that can ignite a culture shift toward good health. 3rd Place: Responsive City Lights: Urban Streets as Public Spaces (UC Berkeley): Responsive City Lights uses interactive light installations to enhance the perception of streets as engaging public spaces. The project reduces crime by increasing foot traffic and pedestrian interaction, bringing the Internet of Things into urban spaces to help fulfill a vital social need.
GLOBAL IMPACT PITCH 1st Place: Clean Water for Crops: As Simple as Sand and Seeds(UC Davis): This project will construct and operate a pilot-scale, slow seed-sand filtration system at UC Davis to assess the feasibility of a drinking water treatment technology, prior to building a pilot-scale system in Sololá, Guatemala in order to adjust the system to local conditions. 2nd Place: Creating Decodable Readers in Haitian Creole(College of William & Mary): This project employs local teachers to create and teach reading materials that integrate Haiti’s mother-tongue and native culture. At its core, it is a software application that enables writers to create books for beginning readers using a systematic phonics approach. 3rd Place: Amplify Impact(UC Berkeley): Amplify Impact raises global awareness about social innovation in the Middle East by providing an online platform for nonprofits and socially minded for-profits to produce and distribute story-driven, low-cost videos. The team envisions a world where initiatives that are catalyzing opportunity, hope, and positive change receive the attention they deserve.
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