Product/Service Development

Clínica Verde is a global healthcare organization that operates a prototype clinic in Boaco, Nicaragua with a focus on providing high-quality maternal and pediatric health services. What Clínica Verde offers is wholly unique among health centers for the underserved in this region: a staff guided by compassion and dignity for the poor; a clinic grounded in principles of sustainable and human-centered design; and the provision of nutrition and health education to enhance self-efficacy and preventive health.

Diarrhea is the 2nd leading cause of mortality for children under five worldwide, causing nearly 800,000 deaths per year. Sanitation work in developing countries has largely addressed the needs of adults while ignoring children’s sanitation and the associated burden on mothers. Recognizing the crucial importance of safe sanitation for children has recently grown in the WASH and nutrition sectors. Children’s feces are more infective than adults’ due to a higher pathogen load. Our Bold Idea is to test a practical and sustainable way for caregivers to dispose of child feces safely.

This project will leverage existing waste collection to process faecal sludge into high-value, cost effective energy resources for the Nepalese brick manufacturing sector, thus not only having a positive effect on the environment but also lessening dependency on expensive imported coal.

Cervical cancer is the leading cause of female cancer-related death in Haiti. Yet, Haiti currently lacks sufficient screening in women of reproductive age. Innovating Health International (IHI) seeks to implement a system of point of care screening with vaginal HPV testing in which positive results are treated with visual inspection with ascetic acid (VIA)/cryotherapy. The private-sector based service delivery model will allow women to receive cervical cancer screening and education directly where they work.

Unintended pregnancies often lead to high levels of unplanned births, unsafe abortions, maternal injuries and death. Reducing unintended pregnancies could prevent 1/4 to 1/3 of maternal deaths and the use of modern contraception is recommended. Our bold idea is to develop a family planning benefits card program (FPBCP) as an incentive system to increase uptake of family planning services among the urban poor men and women aged 15 to 49 years. This program is intended to enable the urban poor to prevent incidences of unintended pregnancies.

WaterAid will revolutionise rural health centres by testing affordable and efficient technologies and mechanisms in three of the poorest provinces of Cambodia. Once scaled, these will give health centres the support they need to reduce maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity. We will use a WASHFIT risk-based approach, designed by WHO, that aligns with Cambodia's National Health Strategy to improve WASH services. The approach will test technology, assess usability and through strong government relationships, enable scalability across Cambodia’s 1100 health centres.

The project is a dual concept of providing nutritional supplement and purifying water using indigenous biodegradable polymers, ispaghula husk and sodium alginate. The team has already established the water purification efficiency of the indigenous biodegradable polymer granules using facile and cost effective technique. The developed granules (1 g/ L) were found to successfully remove 99% of gram positive and gram negative microbes from 1000000 CFU/ mL and 99% azodyes (0.2 g/ L).

Malnutrition is a big problem in Lake Victoria region of Kenya. Nonetheless, there is a nutritious freshwater sardine called Omena which comprises 44% of total catch of fish from the Lake but poor drying leads to huge wastage, lowering food value and incomes. Dried form of this fish has 3 to 6 months shelf life, and can be sold in small portions to meet needs of the rural poor both nutritionally and commercially. Increasing the availability of dried fish in the remote rural areas would help alleviate malnutrition.

Uberlance is a private-public mobile-App based rideshare program which is envisioned to facilitate the provision of lifesaving transport to expectant pregnant women in remote resource-limited settings where traditional ambulances are not well managed and scarce. It borrows the successful independent business models of other rideshare programs globally, where private vehicle owners can meet certain standards and be linked to customers.

The innovation that the proposed project adopts is delivery of comprehensive package of market led solutions that contributed to repairing the dysfunctional sanitation market ecosystem. It will contribute to the goal of decreasing mortality and morbidity of children under five by reducing Open defecation (OD) through facilitation of a sustainable and dynamic market for sanitation product and service delivery. OD can lead to fecal contamination, which contributes significantly to infant morbidity and mortality and stunting in children.