The Somo Project was started to invest in social entrepreneurs committed to changing their own under-resourced communities by providing the necessary training and tools they need to succeed. In Swahili, “somo” means “to learn lessons.” The organization is called the Somo Project because of the team’s belief that talented and visionary entrepreneurs exist in the poorest settlements around the world — but their contributions are often overlooked in development initiatives. Somo identifies people with intimate knowledge of their communities and the relevant social context to address problems such as sanitation, children’s nutrition, job training, and educational opportunity. At the organization’s core is the belief that local context matters and people know their communities and what they need, but often lack the resources to grow and scale a venture. Somo enables people to find their own solutions rather than dictating what their communities need.
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.
In rural Guatemala, where multiple factors conspire to undermine the public’s health, adolescent empowerment represents a promising strategy. Today’s adolescents are future leaders capable of promoting health within their communities, but too often, poor and indigenous youth are denied the opportunity to use their gifts in service of their communities. By providing these youth with the opportunity to attend college and gain work experience, the “Preparing Future Leaders” internship project helps these youth overcome two of the principal barriers they face: lack of prior work experience, and lack money to pay for college. Thus, this program helps youth take the first critical steps toward becoming agents of change who promote sustainable change and improve health conditions in their communities for the long-term.
The Adelante Youth Empowerment Program is a 6-week summer program that serves to motivate at-risk Mexican youth to pursue higher education and professional careers. This is achieved through the use of academic competition-based learning and entrepreneurship-based learning where students lead and develop community development projects. The project will develop fun and engaging STEM and leadership development-based projects while mentoring them to lead their own projects. Also provided are scholarships and mentorship to students who choose to continue their educational journey. The community development projects that the students lead and develop will further provide them with a sense of belonging and purpose. The team expects that Adelante youth will set an example to other community members in how they can be productive and conscious members of society. They will also become mentor figures to other youth who are at risk of dropping out of school.
Transcense makes group conversations possible for 360 million people with hearing loss. With Transcense they can freely communicate with their hearing peers again. Current solutions are unreliable, unaffordable and not adaptable to situations where multiple people are talking in professional or personal gatherings. By connecting smartphones in a room through a mobile app, and using cloud-based speech recognition and speaker identification technologies, Transcense is able to show to the hard-of-hearing person in less than a second, who says what.
Globally, millions of children die from vaccine preventable diseases because they are not fully immunized. In North India, fewer than 50% of children are fully immunized; Emmunify uses communications technology to help vaccinate more infants so they can live longer and healthier, perform better in school, and escape poverty. Emmunify effectively and efficiently tracks the status of each child, reminds clients of where and when vaccines are available, facilitates logistics and supply by aggregating utilization and supply data, and eliminates paper records. It is an innovative low cost, focused portable electronic medical record (EMR) that digitizes and replaces the frequently lost or mutilated paper immunization record. It holds multiple copies of each patient’s vaccination record to ensure the data is not lost – in the cloud-based database and stored on an RFID sticker placed on the family’s mobile phone, an item that is always carried with the patient.
Based in Oakland, Highland Health Advocates is an advocacy program addressing socioeconomic determinants of health by connecting patients/families with community resources. As part of a larger consortium, HHA mobilizes highly-trained volunteers from various backgrounds to improve patients’ health outcomes. The program is comprised of clinic-based social screening and assistance programs, several of which use volunteers and other workforce development recruits to staff a resource “Help Desk.” Compared to the original 15 volunteers, the program has more than quadrupled in size in three years. The desk itself has expanded to three times as many hospital departments and has hired a paid program coordinator, a total of 19 shift leads, 4 program interns, and an MSW intern. With continued expansion and improvement, HHA strives to both better prepare volunteers to advocate for patients and cultivate an understanding of social determinants of health within the community. Through a culture of service, HHA aims to introduce its model (toolkit) to other regional hospitals and gradually improve the way healthcare is approached in the U.S.
The lack of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs that take into account menstrual hygiene and management (MHM) creates asymmetrical negative impacts on women and girls. The Pachamama Project is the first MHM initiative of its kind in Mexico and Bolivia and builds on the successes and challenges encountered during its initial fieldwork and on previous health focused research efforts on MHM. MHM will not become a priority for gender, water, and rights concerns unless researchers and practitioners make deliberate efforts to mainstream MHM into human rights and WASH based initiatives. By framing MHM as a human rights issue, the Pachamama Project taps into larger discourses of justice and gender equality instead of sidelining MHM from the global water, sanitation, and hygiene development agenda. By fostering community discussion, education, and participation in MHM activities, the Pachamama Project will enable structural change on the communities’ terms, while broadening understandings of the human rights connection to water, sanitation, and gender equity.
With more than 1 billion people already living in slums worldwide, concerns for a safe and habitable shelter are growing rapidly. A good roofing system is essential for adequate shelter, but unfortunately it is highly neglected, largely owing to insufficient options in the market. The team’s solution consists of two parts: (a) a unique material mix from recycled and natural materials; and (b) a self-developed manufacturing process to convert the mix to roofing panels. While these have been successfully developed at the prototype scale, the challenge lies in scaling up the manufacturing process while keeping the roof panels at low cost. To make the product available to families living in inadequate housing, the team needs to design a new method to streamline the manufacturing process and develop a marketing and sales strategy that will attract customers, investors and key partners.
