Women living in the squatter settlements of Ulaanbaatar are among the most financially and educationally disadvantaged in Mongolia. The squatter areas—commonly known as “ger districts”—are mainly comprised of recently-migrated nomadic herders. Ger districts make up over 60% of the capital city’s population and have tens of thousands of new arrivals each year. The newly-settled nomads face difficulties in the urban job market due to stark cultural differences between rural and urban lifestyles and a mismatch of employable skills. The challenges of finding employment can result in alcoholism, domestic violence, and cyclical poverty. Women in the squatter settlements need confidence, practical knowledge, and access to capital in order to break from patriarchal gender roles that often prevent them from reaching their full potential as business and community leaders. Through structured small-group support, this project provides impoverished female migrants with information, skills, and low-interest microloans in order to develop their small businesses and foster more economically-resilient communities.
University: UC Berkeley
Project Numa: Low Cost Disposable Battery for the Developing World
Current lighting and phone charging solutions in off-grid regions are hazardous, expensive, and inconvenient. The Low Cost Disposable Battery project addresses these major drawbacks using cheap and safe materials, representing a major shift in the way traditional batteries are made. Users will purchase and assemble the batteries themselves, replacing components as necessary. This solution puts the power in the hands of families, allowing them to personally control their power usage in the safety of their home, at all times of the day, and at a low cost.
ViaeX: Biowaste to Nanofilters for a Sustainable and Clean Future
Rapid modernization and industrialization in developing nations has significantly improved global standards of living at the expense of human health and the global environment. Air pollutants are now regarded as the most widespread carcinogen and lead to 7 million deaths worldwide annually. Project ViaeX aims to restrict human exposure to both indoor and outdoor air pollution while also providing clean air for people of all sectors of the society. ViaeX is developing a novel low-cost high efficiency nano filtration technology, which can remove 99.999% of all pollutants from the air with no end-of- life environmental impacts since the product is 100% biodegradable. This technology has the potential to transform air filtration into an affordable solution for everyone because it can be used to curtail air pollution at the source or at any point where humans may be exposed to it.
The Alternative Iron by Ferrous
The Ferrous team is driven to make sure that for the 2.6 billion people living in energy poverty, modern energy satisfies all their basic human needs including dignity. The Ferrous team’s mission is to design and distribute sustainable, community-supportive, and capacity-building technologies. Ferrous is focused on addressing the current market’s failure to identify and respond to culturally significant needs that the western world has overlooked. A clothing iron compatible with modern energy technology called the Alternative Iron is Ferrous’s first product. With this appliance, Ferrous can rectify the disconnect between social need and technological capacity to ensure that each and every one of its beneficiaries can claim a larger slice of dignity.
FITE Film and Resource Connection
The FITE documentary film will combat recidivism in the prison system by motivating currently incarcerated individuals to seek higher education and mentorship opportunities. To accomplish this goal, the film will feature the success stories of relatable, formerly incarcerated students at UC Berkeley. Screening the documentary in prisons and jails around the U.S. will allow currently incarcerated individuals to learn that it’s not only desirable but also realistic to attain higher education both during and after incarceration. In addition, the creation of a structured, regionally-organized resource connection will supply viewers of the film with phone numbers and contact information of trusted, already established organizations that mentor incarcerated individuals on their journey to seeking higher education.
TIRO
TIRO is a hotline management system designed to give small NGOs serving vulnerable clients in China better record-keeping and reporting capabilities, ultimately improving the efficiency and sustainability of their services to create greater impact. TIRO’s approach is to equip NGOs that operate hotlines with better, lower-cost tools for record-keeping and report-making. Because phone-based consultations remain the most integral part of labor NGOs’ operations, the team is developing a mobile phone application to manage information that surfaces through their hotlines. The solution is based on an Android app that hotline operators can use to log conversation content and retrieve call details. An accompanied web application will permit NGOs to generate reports featuring demographic, caller relationship, and service provisioning metrics.
OhMyCause!
OhMyCause! is a web platform that connects people with causes and non-profits. It is a one-stop shop that presents the curated information and stories about causes, who is doing what and where and match individuals to projects with non-profits that best suit their passions, skills and other preferences. It aims to redefine the world of philanthropy by making caring for causes a usual and personalized activity integrated into people’s lifestyles. The platform’s key foundations are personalization, integration with existing media platforms, and identifying actionable avenues.
Aqua Power: Feed Forward to a Secure Water Future
Water is a precious resource and is vital for all forms of life. In California, 34% of all non-farm use water is used for residential purposes, of which 40% is used in showers, baths and in faucets. Aqua Power aims to address these water shortage challenges by developing an easy to install, low cost device that will provide real time information on the quantity of water used, track cumulative water used per day with the ability to set water saving goals, compare performance with neighbors, and track progress in a social setting. The product aims to achieve water use reduction using a combination of technology and social engineering, and is based on the concept that providing instantaneous feedback is the most effective change agent.
India Smiles
India is currently experiencing rapid economic and industrial expansion, yet, is plagued by the poor health and nutrition of its people. Older approaches to addressing nutritional deficiencies are not as effective as “modern malnutrition” because one of the primary causal factors has only recently emerged: As India becomes a more developed country, its citizens have adopted the dietary habits of other developed nations, falling victim to the “nutrition transition”, or switch from traditional food to processed convenience foods. India Smiles is a unique community-based intervention with a focus on prevention of childhood malnutrition through oral hygiene education and childhood cavity prevention. Using low-cost and effective interventions and health education modules that utilize community health workers, the project works with children aged birth through six and their families to improve the oral health and nutrition status of children in the greater Mumbai, India area.