Best Innovation Awards 2017
- School for Justice – WinnerIndia has the most underage girls in prostitution in the world with an estimated 1.2 million children forced to work in brothels. These girls, some as young as seven, are abducted, sold to traffickers and often tortured. To put an end to the injustice and to take the offenders off the streets, we opened the School for Justice. The School for Justice will help girls who have survived the most unimaginable traumas to turn the injustice of their past situation into a positive force that will help the lives of other people as well. The School for Justice is an educational program, which enables students with different levels of education to study law. With the School for Justice the girls are stepping up and fighting back to the injustice they endured.
- Pezecha – nominee
Micro businesses in Kenya have few, if any, options for a reliable source of credit to grow their businesses. Despite its technological advances, mobile credit in Kenya has left behind the poorest 40% of the population – with penetration in this segment at less than 10%. Pezesha is solving the problem of low-income micro businesses (majority being women) getting affordable access to credit in a way that can build their credit history to be part of the formal financial system. Our response to the problem of low income borrowers being unable to access an affordable line of credit is to build a solution which can accommodate them. Pezesha is a two-sided marketplace which provides credit for borrowers and a return for lenders. We do this by not only seeking alternative data sources to generate a credit score, but through building strategic partnerships with in-person social networks that exist in their communities.
- Momala – nominee
Malaria is still a huge problem in many parts of the world. In 2016 there were 212 million cases of Malaria and 430.000 deaths. One of the core issues is the availability and quality of diagnostics. Microscopy is still the golden standard in the Malaria diagnostic market but is not scalable due to a lack of trained staff. MOMALA offers a solution: Automated diagnoses of Malaria. The MOMALA-app is a smartphone application that is able to detect Malaria parasites in a microscopic image of a blood smear. By attaching the phone’s camera to the microscope’s ocular, the app can automatically take pictures of a thick blood smear and analyze it. MOMALA is a state of the art innovation that will have a great impact on the Malaria diagnostic situation in Africa. The eHealth app will deliver quality and fast diagnoses.
Two additional awards were held that year. First of all, the Innovation Award 2017 also had a Public Award that was won by Health@Hand. Hereby an honourable mention for the initiative that is committed to easier access to care through the YAPILI app.
Thereby a final award was given for the ‘Best Idea’ as a final appreciation of a summer of hard work by joining The Spindle Summer Labs. In this incubator, ten teams worked on their ideas to get them into testable project propositions. In September, the teams of Online Echoes (using user browsing data to connect for positive change), ZINC (create interoperable digital identities using Blockchain technology) and SkinApp (an app that supports healthcare workers to diagnose and treat skin diseases) were the last three standing. In the end, after intense deliberations, the jury picked ZINC because of the potential of its impact.