EMS: Shirati was founded by four Cal seniors in collaboration with the Shirati KMT Hospital in Tanzania and Bay Area NGO AISCS. The team aims to expand upon the the hospital’s Emergency Medical System (EMS), which some of the team members helped establish in 2009. The current objective is to reduce maternal mortality throughout the region of Rorya by working with TBAs and introducing a motorcycle ambulance system. The goal of EMS: Shirati is for community volunteers to train nurses in local hospitals basic Emergency Medicine, specifically for obstetric emergencies and to expand the EMS (Emergency Medical System). The team’s solution is the MedBike, a modified motorbike with a sidecar addition designed to provide safe transportation for pregnant women to reduce maternal mortality. The MedBike will be operated by community volunteers and nurses and will be able to access areas not accessible by cars and ambulances, where the majority of the population of Tarime lives. This will streamline access to medical care in emergency situations, allowing healthcare providers to come to the patient and provide care until they get to a doctor, significantly increasing survival rates.
The E-du-waste project focuses on Guiyu, China, the largest electronic waste dumping ground in the world and provides an approach to help the people who are forced to rummage through E-waste for survival. The project will focus on educating middle school students in Guiy by organizing an Englishlanguage summer day-camp over 5 days for middle schools in Guiyu. The aim of the camp is to equip the local students with critical thinking skills and to help them gain insights on global environmental issues through education in Art, Film and Science. The process will be filmed and made available to recycling centers as possible publicity material. The goal is to motivate students in Guiyu to seek higher education and avoid harmful E-waste recycling jobs in the future.
Vuwa seeks to combat poor farming yields, low income and the declining living standards due to the high cost of water in Kenya. The Vuwa Enterprise has designed a scalable shower water drip irrigation system capable of irrigating cash crops for farmers in Kenya and other developing countries. The product sells at an affordable 1483 shillings and can be made even more affordable through Vuwa Enterprise’s lending models. The Shower Water Drip Irrigation System consists of a platform that is installed in a customer’s bath area. During bucket showers the water falls through the platform and is caught in the black plastic tarp and will flow into bottles that connect to drip irrigation tape leading to nearby crops. All components of the system can be bought in local rural Kenyan markets.
In collaboration with a U.S. based, Kenyan registered, 501c3 non-profit, called the Organic Health Response, a team of interdisciplinary UCSF, UCB, and University of Minnesota undergraduate and graduate students coming from a range of different departments including, but not limited to: medicine, environmental science, architecture, and anthropology have created a hyper efficient bio-dynamic aquaponic farming system to be built on the remote island of Mfangano, located in Nyanza Province of western Kenya. This project is to be realized during the summer of 2011 with the help of local artisans, farmers, and builders,and a group of students from UCB and UCSF. The continued iniative of the Organic Health Response and this group of students to find alternative forms treatment to the staggering prevelence of HIV/AIDS in the region prompted the need to create reliable, sustainable, economically viable, and highly efficient food production systems to turn the tide against HIV/AIDS in this region of the world.
Mobilizing Health is committed to increasing access to emergency and preventative healthcare for rural populations in developing countries through the use of mobile technology for medical advice and treatment. This is accomplished by using a text message-based platform to connect villagers to licensed medical practitioners in nearby towns and cities. Their goal is to help thousands of villagers by building a network of site directors who are managed by a full-time incountry Manager and two Regional Site Directors. During the summer of 2010, they have already implemented the program in 50 villages in India, and hope to expand the program to more areas in the upcoming years. Mobilizing Health tackles the issue of overcrowded facilities by giving people knowledge of how to treat the problem at their location if possible, thereby minimizing the need to travel to the hospitals and increasing equitable access to healthcare.
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.
