USAID's Development 2.0 Challenge on Mobile Innovation: And the Winner is UNICEF/Columbia University

Posted by KatrinVerclas on Jan 08, 2009

UPDATE:  Henrietta Fore, the administrator of USAID, announced today the winner of the USAID Development 2.0 Innovation Challenge focused on mobile technology.  MobileActive was a judge for the Challenge. The Challenge, a co-production between USAID's Development Commons and Netsquared, focused on mobiles in development. The winner of the $10,000 award is Child Malnutrition Surveillance and Famine Response

The Child Malnutrition Response uses mobile tech and specifically a UNICEF-developed tool, RapidSMS, to improve the speed and quality of nutrition surveillance data for children in Malawi. The project is led by team of six students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), who are working alongside UNICEF to deploy and adapt RapidSMS as an open source mobile phone platform for nutritional data. We have written about the pilot UNICEF project in Ethopia here and have reviewed RapidSMS here. 

Runner-ups of the Challenge are two other mobile projects: 

  • Click Diagnostics enables health practitioners in developing counyries to provide advanced medical consultation and to gather health data more efficiently.
    ClickDiagnostics addresses two main healthcare issues in developing countries: 1. Access to medical specialists in under-served regions; 2. Collection of real-time data for interventions in areas such as maternal mortality, cancer or AIDS.  
  • Ushahidi is an open source software that solves communication and visualization challenges during crises situations through mapping and crowdsourcing, allowing anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.  It has been recently deployed in Gaza by Al Jazeera. 

Check out the list of all of the 15 finalists for the Challenge.

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