Meet the Fellows

Ken Banks joins the Program as a Collaboration Fellow, working with other DVP Fellows to help design and develop their projects. He has a degree in social anthropology and development studies and brings with him over 20 years of high-tech experience from the private, corporate and non-profit sectors. Over the past thirteen years Ken has worked on numerous conservation and development projects in Zambia, Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique and for the past three has run his own consultancy - kiwanja.net - specializing in the application of mobile technology in the non-profit sector. Ken project managed the European rollout of the first conservation-based mobile portal in 2003/2004 with Vodafone and has more recently worked with the likes of Microsoft, Fauna & Flora International and United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) on the practical application of technology for social and environmental benefit.

Hernan Carvajal will work on a special project in conjunction with the DVP’s partner, the Women’s World Banking. Carvajal will employ a needs-based approach to design, develop and deploy a simple system to allow micro-entrepreneurs to register their business transactions, generate reports and communicate directly with micro-finance institutions. The objective of this project is to improve micro-entrepreneurs’ financial literacy and business results and to enhance the efficiency of micro-finance institutions. The project will initiate with WWB affiliates in Colombia and the Dominican Republic.

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.

Disease surveillance is an important aspect of any public health program that serves two essential purposes, one of which is the early detection of outbreaks to initiate investigative and control measures, and the other is for monitoring the progress of ongoing medical interventions for disease reduction. Disease Surveillance is also a basic tool for the field epidemiologist as surveillance data provide a scientific basis for implementation of an appropriate health-care policy, disease control decisions, the evaluation of the efficacy of surveillance initiatives, and for the allocation of resources in the primary health-care system.

Mobile technologies can play a critical role in assisting health-care providers in delivering timely medical response to local clusters of disease and in containing the outbreaks. A wireless-enabled mobile device provides the ideal platform for collection of data in the field which is accurate and validated, and then for transmitting it to a centralized location for analysis and feedback in real-time. It empowers the field health-worker to travel to remote areas for data collection and report information in real-time to help the epidemiological community increase health coverage to underserved remote communities.

Our objective is to develop a generic forms-based solution for the collection of data on diseases under surveillance, in an effort to reduce response times, reduce transaction costs and improve health coverage through the use of cost-effective mobile devices.

Technology can play a critical role in preventing large scale outbreaks of communicable diseases. Most outbreaks start in small clusters, and if detected and investigated early, their spread could be more easily prevented or controlled. RDVP candidate Shashank Garg from India will develop an open-source, sustainable, and efficient disease surveillance system that will detect and respond to outbreaks in a timely manner. This system will utilize a mobile device to accurately collect data, validate it at the source, and immediately transmit it to a server where resident experts can identify trends and make informed decisions. Garg is an award winning innovator; he won India’s prestigious Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology for being one of the seven co-developers of the Simputer.

Robotics competitions have been used to improve the math, science, and creative thinking skills of youth in the United States for more than a decade. RDVP candidate Marvin Hall uses this technique to capture the imagination of at-risk youth in inner cities in small, developing countries. Hall’s workshops culminate in a robotics exhibition for the community and provide a well needed form of positive recognition for these youth. Hall, the founder of Halls of Learning robotics training center, has provided scholarships for 150 youth to attend his robotics courses and has brought a Jamaican robotic team to an international competition. Hall will construct Robotics Learning Centers in communities, which will also contribute to IT access for the community at large. More information on Halls of Learning is available at http://www.hallsoflearning.com/

Cathy Healy will use her experience as a newspaper reporter, novelist, magazine and Intranet editor to collaborate with Digital Vision fellows to help make their projects a reality. For nearly 17 years, she was at National Geographic; prior to that, she was the editor of Americas magazine published by the Organization of American States.

She took early retirement from Geographic to come to Stanford and scale a six-year project with Brazilian public-school English teachers whose students are building fluency and global leadership skills by participating in P2P online collaborative projects through iEARN, a network of one million students in 115 countries, doing projects in 30+ languages.

Brazilians need to pass English, Spanish or French exams to enter a university and by 2010, they will need Spanish to graduate from secondary school. However, because of Brazil's size and economic clout, many Brazilians, and especially those in public schools, seldom, if ever, hear the language they are studying. Thus, it’s hard for language teachers to build fluency and harder still to build motivation.

Studies show that online collaborations can increase reading-writing-speaking-listening skills in a foreign language by as much as 20%.

Cathy’s partner, Profa. Almerinda Garibaldi MSc, teaches in the Centro de Interescolar de Lingas de Taguatinga, which has led the introduction of collaborative projects in the Federal District of Brasilia. CILT is one of eight, publicly-funded Centros in DF; they teach English, Spanish and French to 32,000 students in grades 5 to 12.

Edgardo Herbosa is the Managing Director of b2bpricenow.com, “the Official e-marketplace of the Philippines for Agriculture and Fisheries Sector” as endorsed by the Philippine government. b2bpricenow.com provides both content - free commodity pricing information to all members of the agricultural supply chain - and connectivity - b2bcenters (Internet centers installed in agricultural cooperatives). There are currently US$ 3 billion dollars worth of products posted on b2bpricenow.com and it began to facilitate online transactions and payments in April of 2006. b2bpricenow.com and its founder have won numerous awards: the World Bank’s Marketplace Development Award (2001), Stockholm Challenge (Finalist, 2004), and The Outstanding Young Men (T.O.Y.M.) Award for Community Development category (2005) for Herbosa’s work on b2bpricenow.com.

In this project, camera phones will be used to create and share personal stories. Young people from various cultures will learn more about each other as they connect with their counterparts in an online community. They will also gain skills through the story creation process, such as communications, editing, and production.

Business value will be created by incorporating the most compelling stories into a online marketing service for the camera phones. This service will validate personal expression as the primary usage of the devices.

ICE is a broadband wireless network initiative that will transform 100 Nigerian universities into digital campuses by connecting them to each otherand to the world. The digital campuses will serve as hubs for digital cities whose success will fuel a regional rollout. This affordable community-driven infrastructure/content play is sustained by a scalable subscription business model.
The venture is being developed in partnership with Cisco Systems (the world's largest networking company), NeGSt Global (Nigeria's eGovernment process managers), and other leading global ICT partners. The ICE wireless research and social network will allow Nigeria's 1 million higher-ed students and 100,000 researchers to create and share applications and local content using the ICE software platform that will be mobile capable.
Users will also be able to browse the web, share and create applications and content, do research, and interact with those on other networks in other regions and continents.
To get involved in ICE as an investor, donor, business developer, or technical assistor, please email Nam Mokwunye, Founder and Reuters Fellow, at diginam@stanford.edu or call +1.650.521.2211.

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.

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.

It is a challenge to learn, gather and easily access contextual
information in India. Children "walk-out" of school because classroom experience is disconnected from real life experience (e.g., scarcity of water). At the same time, people drop out of engaging with the government because it does not provide easily accessible or reliable information. Netika will develop a "Big Game" on water issues for children that will be relevant, interactive, useful for geo-spatial learning. A byproduct of this game is the collection of reliable, people centered information that will be accessible via a GIS map and community call centers. The objective is to track resulting reduced drop out out rates in 900,000 govt schools as well as to reduce the time and cost of information access for government and people.

Y-Fi (Youth Financial Literacy) aims to communicate the basics of personal financial management to youth in marginal areas via the use of fun, interactive, multi-player, multiple-turn simulation games delivered on mobile devices. Adam will be working with inner city high school students in the U.S. to design and pilot Yi-Fi before rolling it out in his native Romania and his adopted homeland, India. Although Y-Fi’s games will be tailored to different age groups and various populations, the goal of every game will be to introduce concepts of personal finance management with lifelike risks and rewards.
Adam is a successful social entrepreneur who has built and run educational programs in 14 countries (see Learning Enterprises: www.learningenterprises.org, The Learning Foundation India: www.tlfi.org, and The Educated Consumer Project: www.ecponline.org). Educated at Harvard College (B.A.), The London School of Economics (M.Sc.), Harvard University (M.A.) and Georgetown University (Ph.D. in progress) he was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company for a number of years prior to devoting himself full time to social entrepreneurship.

The Digital Inclusion Center Sustainability Project will broaden the financial support given to existing Digital Centers that bridge the digital divide for thousands of poor Brazilians, adding social entrepreneurship to the current non-profit funding model. Rather than applying a single model for developing the micro-business arm of the Digital Centers, Fabiana Rodrigues Valente will use the opportunity at Stanford to evaluate multiple business models, bring the best models back, and test them in multiple locations. The goal is to that generate sufficient business revenue to expand the existing network from forty to fifty Digital Centers that serve 30,000 people, and to eliminate dependence on outside non-profit funding. Once tested and scaled up, the model will be a reference case for the global community.

HIV/Aids, poverty, violence and unemployment affect a large proportion of youth in Southern and Eastern Africa. An indication of this is an estimated orphan population of 12 million in 2001. To help address these issues, REPSSI (Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative) provides psychosocial (social and emotional) technical support to over 60 implementing partners, including those in the Western Cape province of South Africa (SA). A hero book is a low-cost, simple and effective form of psychosocial support (PSS) where a child is the author, illustrator, main character (hero) and editor of a paper-based book that is designed to help them deal with life's challenges. The Digital Hero Book Project (DHBP) builds on the success of this Memory Work by introducing information and communication technologies (ICTs) that enable authors to digitise their hero books and publish them on a community-based website. The site will also facilitate a support network for hero book facilitators. The life and ICT skills gained by participants are well documented.

For various reasons, current hero booking and digital storytelling efforts are limited in reach; by operating through existing ICTfacilities the DHBP helps to address this issue. Khanya, the Western Cape Education Department's award-winning "Technology in Education" initiative, has recognised digital hero booking as a way to improve e-literacy levels, teach related issues such as web publishing and child safety on the internet, build social inclusion by giving the youth a voice and, by sharing stories online, help foster community development. The DHBP is an 18-month pilot project implemented within a number of Khanya schools.