As technology becomes relevant to address social problems in developing countries, the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had launched a seed grant program in which its students competed with innovative ideas for bringing about social change. Fourteen teams of students were selected for the funding support in eight low-income and developing countries around the world to implement projects in partnership with local communities and organizations using energy, health, water, information and data collection, mobile services etc. Here, we discuss a few of such projects that can provide important leads for building newer ideas in other places.
The Celedu (Cellular + Education) project in rural parts of India has been developed to spread literacy “by developing literacy applications for locally available cell phones.” Managed by Alex Shih, Claire Cunningham and Swaminathan Sekar, the project will involve “a game-based learning platform that transforms culturally relevant board games to teach basic literacy.” DataMapping project from another team will “will address the significant lack of comprehensive data for assessing housing needs in rural areas of developing countries by aggregating a centralized visual statistics data bank using mobile phones” in Kenya. In Peru, the Grassroots Mapping Kit will assist local communities and organizations in mapping settlements in Lima. The China project by Lilei Xu and Mia Yinuo Qian is on Innovative Marketing and Education that will set up a performance-based cash reward system targeted at the children of migrant workers in schools so that they can perform better academically and this can further be used as leverage for companies, which employ these migrant workers, for marketing purposes. The Tanzanian Micro Health Insurance project by a five-student team will set up schemes for reducing the costs of healthcare for the poor and also provide microcredit services to cover unexpected illnesses. David Auerbach, Ani Vallabhaneni and Jeff Zira have the Sanergy project for Kenya where “the lack of sanitation and energy affecting urban slums in developing countries by creating a profitable closed-loop sanitation cycle.” In Honduras, the team of Elizabeth Basha, Andrea Llenos and Carrick Detweiler will work on Terra Monitoring which will provide “sustainable sensor network-based automated systems capable of predicting and warning about river flooding and landslides.” More innovative projects and ideas can be found at this link.
