2005-2006 Fellows

e-Mandi, an agricultural exchange, is currently being built as NSEAP (National Spot Exchange for Agricultural Produce). NSEAP would increase the income of over 700 million farmer families by a minimum of 50%. It will also create value by reducing wastages (10-15% in food grains, 45% in fruits & vegetables) and creating an efficient, transparent market.

Open Technologies Business Incubator is a prototype for a university-based technology business incubator for developing countries. It aims to build a pipeline from open source software conceptualization by students within the university's IT and entrepreneurship programs, to commercialization by entrepreneurs within the incubator. The objective is to reduce brain drain of IT skilled workers through growing local ICT capacity.

Developing countries face massive youth unemployment. In order to grow and participate in the global economy, they require a workforce with applied technology skills. RETOOL encompasses three strategic initiatives to develop scalable and replicable employment and skill building opportunities for youth in less developed countries.

Vamos Blogar (blogar.org) is a literacy curriculum based on multimedia weblogs for street children in Rio de Janeiro. In partnership with local NGO Projeto Uerê, we target lack of self-esteem and employability skills amongst this at-risk population which totals millions in Brazil. Building competencies around self-generated content motivates children and gives them jobs off the streets and out of illicit trades.

RIVERS aims to create a platform to deliver government to citizen services, also allowing citizens to customize. Unique is its approach of creating a framework of voice-based applications to be delivered by handheld devices like Simputer over wireless networks. The pilot project partnering with government is to create a rural stock exchange for tribal groups collecting minor forest produce.

Cooperative Connection provides an alternative to sweatshop labor: this venture links cooperatives, collectives, and other grassroots producer groups based in India to distributors and retailers in the U.S. market. Cooperative Connection expands market opportunities for cooperatives and collectives by assisting in product design so that clothing and accessories match current design trends in the global market.

Many farmers in the developing world lack relevant market information, limiting their access to better markets and better prices for their produce. PML will change this by delivering information on-demand, directly to cell phones, on a fee-for-service basis. Partnering with major content providers and cell phone operators will turn this need into a commercially viable operation. PML is being funded and conducted in collaboration with the Reuters Venture Program.

MIFOS's goal is to automate transaction processing for microfinance institutions in the developing world. MIFOS will increase access to financial and banking services by enhancing the infrastructure of local microfinance institutions. MIFOS, based on an open source model, will offer a flexible and reliable management information system.
http://mifos.org

The mission of the project is to design and develop tele-healthcare technological solutions for disaster hit areas. Whenever a major disaster hits a region, the basic infrastructure, including healthcare facilities, are severely damaged. We propose to develop rapidly deployable and portable tele-health facilities in disaster hit areas so doctors could start treating patients within a very short span of time.

tele-healthcare.org

At least two billion people will be subjected to disasters in our lifetime. BeingPrepared is at the core of our prototype offering to help local populations prepare for the most likely catastrophes in their area. Recent history has shown that an ounce of preparedness is worth a pound of cure, and that local preparedness is of paramount importance.

URLs: http://www.BeingPrepared.org, http://www.Reliefopedia.org

Amplified Voices will train high school students in the West Bank to film, edit and produce short digital documentaries that share their perspectives on local issues impacting their community. The documentaries will be placed on an online portal that can engage the students and the larger development community in an ongoing discussion of the issues addressed by the documentaries.

Rita collaborates with DV fellows to promote the integration of technology, humanity, and business. She has worked in Silicon Valley for over fifteen years in various capacities. At Hewlett Packard, she helped develop the first program in the industry where a high-tech company partnered with the United Nations to provide technology to developing countries. She has an MBA and B.S. in Computer Engineering.

Cross Border Mentor connects budding entrepreneurs in emerging markets, beginning in Estonia, with experienced volunteer business advisers in the US and EU. We create and facilitate international mentoring relationships using Internet-based technologies. Our program seeks to close the critical information and know-how gaps that prevent micro-entrepreneurs from successfully participating in new markets.

Our goal is to eradicate women’s illiteracy within the next twenty years. Our approach combines the power of women’s networks with the power of technology to mobilize large numbers of women as donors and advocates. At RDVP we are creating a first version of an Internet based forum intended to link donors with beneficiaries and serve as an anchor for an expanded international community of literacy supporters.

Journalists are put to danger and may be inhibited/stopped from covering the news in emerging democracies and other troubled areas. Yet the need of independent news media is ever as high. Delivering unfiltered, uncontrolled and as free news as possible is a crucial part of any work towards and/or to sustain democracy. Making people trust the news media and to enable them to feel part of the news making is equally important. Therefore a big part of this project is to strengthen the citizen journalistic part of news media in those regions and empower people to tell their story. Imagine people being able to report back from events such as the London bombings, the riots in Paris and the recent events in Belarus or maybe just report from your neighbourhood about any crims or other problems.

Laura’s focus is on user-centered design for technologies in the developing world. As a collaborative fellow, she is assisting other fellows in bringing user needs into all phases of design. For the last five years she has been at Forrester Research where she has developed and institutionalized their in-house usability program. While at Stanford, she is exploring usability issues in mobile applications and for non-literate populations.

FarsiTeachNet (FTN) is an online community of practice for Farsi speaking teachers around the world. FTN mobilizes Farsi speaking teachers’ energy, experience, and knowledge to make a sustained change in their educational community. As a result, the citizens of these countries participate more fully in goal setting for the social agenda as better problem solvers and decision makers.

SocialWay is a global website that makes it easy for people to share items and thereby gets more usage from things. This simple idea addresses socio-economic and environmental issues; (a) environmental - since increased reuse reduces carbon emissions and saves natural resources, and (b) socio-economic - since an individual gets access to community resources thus multiplying everyone's available pool. This is of particular significance in developing countries, for instance, where good libraries are hard to come by even for the middle class.

Chronic non-communicable diseases prevalent in the developed world are poorly managed largely due to failures in the provider/patient interface, especially in patient tracking and supply chain management. By slightly modifying existing software, a user-friendly, sustainable, cost-effective solution can be created to address the patient tracking and availability issues.

Through her research, Neerja will form a sustainable business model for education centers or other educational ventures in underserved areas by outlining possible pitfalls and good practices for a successful outcome. She will investigate social entrepreneur programs in Silicon Valley, including RDVP projects, in the area of technology usage as case studies to be used for a book to be published later.

eNalanda is a www based ICT B2B/B2C exchange with an integrated on-demand browser based collaborative-programming technology that fundamentally disrupts the economics of deploying an infrastructure across Human Capital Cycle of elearning, Testing, Certification, and Jobs. The focus geographies are developing economies, such as India, with the opportunity to catalyze hundreds of thousands of students per region per year, with sustainable economics.

NextGen Leadership Landscapes seeks to catalyze innovation in practice and technology to support and nurture next generation leadership networks in the non-profit and international development communities. We will do so by prototyping solutions using social software, social network analysis, and communities of practice.

NextGen Leadership Landscapes seeks to catalyze innovation in practice and technology to support and nurture next generation leadership networks in the non-profit and international development communities. We will do so by prototyping solutions using social software, social network analysis, and communities of practice.