Global Social Venture Competition

Global Finalists - 2009

Avi Clinics, Haas School of Business

Avi Clinics envisions transforming rural healthcare in India by using telemedicine. Merely 3% of India’s qualified medical staff lives in rural India compared to 70% of its overall population. The current rural public healthcare infrastructure is woefully inadequate. Moreover, qualified doctors are reluctant to establish private practice in rural areas because of poor civil infrastructure. As a result, there is an abundance of qualified doctors in urban areas, where only highly specialized doctors eventually become successful in establishing profitable private practices. Avi Clinics intends to bridge the gap between rural patients who seek quality healthcare and the qualified urban doctors who struggle to sustain profitable practices. Avi Clinics will enable doctors in urban centers to provide medical services to rural patients over a wireless long distance network called WiLDNet, which was pioneered by Professor Eric Brewer of UC Berkeley.

Castor & Pollux, Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration, Chulaongkorn University

Castor & Pollux develops and commercializes LeptoSpotTM, a diagnostic kit for leptospirosis, a serious but neglected bacterial disease affecting 10 million people a year with 500 million at risk worldwide. Despite having inexpensive and widely available cure, leptospirosis kills so many people because it is difficult to diagnose. Its symptoms resemble those of many other diseases and its diagnosis requires complicated lab equipment and highly trained technicians, which are unavailable in rural areas of tropical countries where leptospirosis outbreaks predominantly occur. LeptoSpotTM solves this problem by using the nanogold technology and antigendetecting technique to provide early detection capability, simplicity of use, and affordability. It comes as a ready‐to‐use 0.5‐ml solution requiring no complicated labs or experienced technicians. Early and effective diagnosis leads to timely and suitable treatment which can lead to more lives saved.

EcoFaeBrick, Prasetiya Mulya Business School

EcoFaeBrick, in conjunction with Faerumnesia, produces high quality and low price bricks by utilizing the abundant cow dung in Godean and Sayegan, Jogjakarta. The utilization of the cow dung will not only solve the hygiene problem but also reduce the exploitation of the unrenewable clay. The replacement of firewood with the cow dung methane biogas in the combustion process brings a lower production cost with a more environmental friendly process. EcoFaeBrick also empowers rural people through close partnership with local communities. Using business model which involves the housing developers, NGOs, and local communities, EcoFaeBrick builds a sustainable market demand to ensure an interesting financial return to the investors. The EcoFaeBrick’s expansion plan focuses on areas with rapid development and high concentration of cattle farm. EcoFaeBrick offers a feasible solution for rapidly developing areas not only in Indonesia but also in other emerging countries.

Gearch, London Business School

Gearch is a Google powered search engine and portal that uses all the money generated by the searches to plant trees in tropical countries. Gearch provides search users the same result as Google and allows users to track their individual contribution by their “tree counter”. Once a user has a full tree, they choose the country where it will be planted and name it, giving a sense of ownership and achievement. This is reinforced by Gearch’s social networking component, which highlights the cumulative power of the small actions of many people. Gearch is already profitable and has planted over 200 trees in four different developing countries. We aim to plant almost 1m trees a year by 2012 and 74m trees a year by 2025. All our profits are reinvested into trees or other environmental projects. We work with highly reputable partner NGOs and our accounts will be audited and transparent.

mPEDIGREE LOGISTICS, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth

mPedigree Logistics provides pharmaceutical companies with robust anti‐counterfeit solutions appropriate for emerging markets, with added value via mobile marketing and granular supply chain oversight. The WHO estimates that up to 30% of drugs sold in developing nations are fakes, containing little to no active ingredients or laced with malicious chemicals. The growing global counterfeit drug market is estimated to reach US $75 billion by 2010, forming about 10% of all global pharmaceutical trade. Our technology leverages the power of 4 billion cell phones worldwide. With our service, consumers can check their drugs before use with a simple text message. Genuine manufacturers can reclaim market share lost to counterfeiters while boosting sales with targeted advertisements at the point of purchase, a world‐first innovation.

Pesinet, ESSEC Business School

Pesinet is a not‐for‐profit international organization delivering a simple prevention and earlycare system for countries lacking medical resources. Pesinet was designed to offset the weaknesses of existing public healthcare systems and provide affordable healthcare services for children and pregnant women thanks to the periodic and cost‐efficient monitoring of key health data. By leveraging mobile technologies, proximity groundwork and a powerful micro‐health insurance system co‐financed by relatives outside the country, the service manages to significantly reduce mortality rates and emergency treatments and opens up job and learning opportunities for employees. For a monthly fee affordable to low‐income families, subscribers get periodic home‐based health check‐up by local agents, remote medical monitoring by the doctor of the local community health center, early‐detection and treatment of diseases and access to discounted medication. Pesinet started in Mali and is already demonstrating promising results in the field. Future deployments are planned in Burkina Faso and Niger.

Pioneer Healthcare Services, Indian School of Business

Many rural areas in India do not have accessible, affordable and professional healthcare facilities. In an effort to address the concern of this majority of population, we propose building a network of hospitals in rural areas that will be served by a 100‐bed central city hospital in a “Hub and Spoke” model. The city hospital at Chennai, a city in the state of Tamil Nadu, India will serve two 25‐bed rural centers, one each at Ponneri and Guduvancheri, two villages near Chennai. This is a high‐volume low‐cost model with emphasis on maximum resource utilization. Extensive use of Telemedicine and 24‐hr ambulance support will be the predominant means of connectivity. Local people would be trained as paramedical personnel for generating local employment. The total initial investment is estimated to be USD 3.8 million with an ROI of 36.11% over five years. The SROI has been calculated to be at 497%.

Mauka, Columbia Business School

Despite the much talked about growth phenomenon in India, the population below poverty line remains at 25% and stems from symptoms of a larger problem – unemployment, now at a staggering 7.2%. Ironically, due to the absence of an organized semi‐skilled sector, there is a dearth of people available for semi‐skilled jobs. Mauka thus aims to make a direct positive impact on these unemployed urban youth. Through the formation of a centralized call center, Mauka will assemble a cadre of individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds that have completed training programs through our partner organizations in any one of three specified trades: electrical work, plumbing, and auto repair. Our call center’s target segment includes corporations and households in need of reliable semi‐skilled technicians. As such, Mauka aims to bridge the gap between some of India’s harshest extremes through a multi‐fold plan to uplift urban youth through guaranteed job placement post‐training.

SolarCycle, George Washington University School of Business

SolarCycle's primary innovation is a low‐cost reflective material made from used plastic bags and the interior of metalized chip bags that can replace mirrors in solar concentrating applications for developing countries. We've designed this product to help low‐income urban Africans turn a local trash problem into a cheap, green and revolutionary new product that can assist rural people with both solar cooking and water pasteurization. SolarCycle will address the staggering environmental damage and negative health effects caused by contaminated drinking water and indoor air pollution in the developing world with its two products. A solar cooker made from our material would be durable and the most affordable on the market. Additionally, we have developed a novel pasteurizer design that takes advantage of a large collection area made possible by the low cost of our material to purify water for an entire village for ten years for only $350.

UMMEED, S P Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai, India

Menstrual hygiene has been an unattended basic need, shrouded by myths and taboos. Majority of Indian women use cloth and other unhygienic means for protection during menstruation which often leads to vaginal infections, skin irritations and embarrassing stains in public. It also results in increased dropout rate of girls from schools, and decreased productivity in workplaces. UMMEED proposes a socially viable and commercially sustainable business model that runs on the principle ‘of the women, by the women, for the women’. We provide easy access to affordable sanitary napkins and create awareness among rural women on menstrual hygiene. Involving rural women right from production to distribution, we empower them economically by providing employment opportunities while also creating a huge social impact by providing access to better health conditions. Our model gains a competitive edge over local manufacturers in terms of quality and over MNCs in terms of affordability and accessibility.

SIA Finalists

ArtIsAn Art, Indian School of Business

ArtIsAn Art is an enterprise driven solution to eliminate poverty and build sustainable livelihood opporunities for artisans. Artisans lack access to capital and institutional support resulting in an inability to participate in markets effectively. ArtIsAn Art aims at eliminating unfair appropriation of artisan wages by middlemen and at the creation of sustainable demand for artisan wares. ArtIsAn Art will form artisan collectives that help organize artisan communities and build efficiencies on the supply side. It will stimulate the demand for artisan products through extensive brand building and marketing via multiple sales channels. Funds will be made available to artisan collectives by facilitating capital access through banks, microfinance institutions and collective artisan corpuses. Artisan Art will set industry standards for ethical sourcing and fair trade practices. It will create sustainable livelihood opportunities for artisan communities and cause an increase in the absolute earnings of artisans and thus enable not only current but also future generations of artisans to practice their livelihood with fairness and dignity.

Auto TB, UC Berkeley

More than one‐third of the world’s population is infected with tuberculosis. Improved diagnostics are crucial in combating this growing epidemic. AutoTB’s device automates sputum microscopy, thereby decreasing analysis time, increasing sensitivity and eliminating human error present in current procedures while integrating into existing infrastructures and remaining affordable for developing countries. The medical and economic benefits of this device will provide a competitive advantage over existing technologies and make it marketable to NGOs and governmental health departments.

Bright Mind LABS, University of Auckland

There is fantastic educational gaming made for the likes of Nintendo. And it works. BrightMind Labs are applying these proven principles to meet psychological needs. By creating world‐class, clinically robust computer games that young people actually want to play, they aim to bring the therapist’s couch into the living room. Immersive gaming will be developed for the likes of depression, anxiety and post‐traumatic stress disorder. But first, BrightMind Labs will test and perfect their business model with their first product – a game created to teach children on the autistic spectrum to recognise and respond to emotions.

Cambodia Project, Inc., Columbia Business School

Cambodia Project, Inc. (CPI) is a not‐for‐profit organization committed to developing high quality secondary education for underserved children in rural Cambodia. CPI works in collaboration with communities to provide innovative and replicable school models, high quality transformative educational resources, and better trained teachers in both the public and private education systems. Each school will incorporate environmentally‐friendly technologies such as rooftop terraces, solar voltaic panels, and rain‐water capturing structures to supply fresh water. Based on CPI's model, each school will become financially self‐reliant and locally‐managed by the end of year five. CPI’s funding model incorporates resources from tuition, microfinance, agriculture, vocational and trade skills, and volunteer tourism.

GoalSpring, Haas School of Business

GoalSpring’s first product, DebtGoal, is an online subscription service for households revolving credit card debt. Our mission is to relieve the crippling effect that debt has on people and their communities. DebtGoal accommodates all debt accounts, including credit cards, auto loans, student loans, and mortgage debt. DebtGoal provides: (1) an organized and view of debt accounts with the best pay‐down strategy, (2) optimized monthly payments, saving users thousands in interest, (3) the insight to help users take control of their credit scores, (4) help negotiating with creditors and other recommendations to accelerate debt pay‐down, and (5) regular progress reports and payment alerts. DebtGoal helps customers increase their credit score while they make progress on their debt balances – differentiating it strongly from other “get out of debt services” such as Credit Counseling and Debt Settlement.