Young Innovators to Watch Featured at Tsinghua UNICEF Youth Innovation Forum
Young Innovators to Watch Featured at Tsinghua UNICEF Youth Innovation Forum
Did you miss the Tsinghua-UNICEF Youth Innovation Forum last month? Well, we hope you can make it next year. For now, we are sharing with you some highlights of the young innovators featured at the forum. They came from different parts of the world with distinctive backgrounds and personal stories. What they have in common are empathy, passion to serve and an entrepreneurial spirit to innovate for disadvantaged groups of people, especially children and young people.
Here are their stories.
Davis Musinguzi is a medical doctor, health IT architect and entrepreneur from Uganda. He is also Managing Director of The Medical Concierge Group (TMCG), an IT company providing technology solutions in health care. He was inspired to start up the TMCG group by the daunting challenges to extend health care services to the most hard-to-reach communities. These communities are remote, rural, with low income and scarce health care facilities and services. Hence, they have a pressing need for different kinds of health services that do not always involve traveling to clinics, which is costly in terms of time, transportation and accommodation.
TMCG has conducted one million doctor and pharmacist consultations with youth via voice calls, SMS, social media and WhatsApp and responds to all health questions from UNICEF U-reporters in Uganda, all of which has reduced the time and cost to access a health professional by more than 90 per cent.
Malele Ngalu has a personal story and inspiration that touched all of us. Malele lost his twin brother at birth from a preventable condition—pneumonia. His passion to ensure that no mother dies giving birth or no child dies from a treatable disease motivates his commitment to maternal and child health care. Malele is the Director of Sales and Marketing at Totohealth—an award-winning health innovation enabling more than 15,000 mothers from marginalized communities to monitor their pregnancy and the health of their children, from conception to the fifth birthday. TotoHealth provides a subscription service which includes a Childcare Package of 17 life-saving commodities accompanied by weekly text messages for rural parents and teen moms.
Here is another health-related innovation but quite different in terms of his approach. Bassel Kassem, while still a student at Lebanese American University based in Beirut, has, together with a student team, created Incubaby. It is a low-cost incubator for newborns that can be used in emergency situations and resource-scarce environments.
Lebanon has received a massive number of refugees affected by the Syrian conflict, and many of the refugees live in camps that are not equipped with sufficient health care facilities. UNICEF Lebanon launched a challenge to ask students to come up with creative solutions to improve the situation for refugees. Seeing these dire situations first-hand, Bassel and his classmates decided to enter the challenge by using what they had learned in school to create something that could help save the lives of newborns. The team received mentorship from their faculty and the UNICEF Lebanon country office and eventually won the Design for UNICEF Challenge.
Inadequate information and communications keep people away from entering the market and participating in market activities And it is the motivation for Peris Bosire, who is passionate about Africa and the opportunities that exist to adequately empower the continent to thrive economically and become self-reliant. She has been involved in various IT-for-development projects focusing on building mobile telephone applications for developing economies.
Now Peris is the co-founder of FarmDrive. By harnessing the power of data analytics and mobile technology, FarmDrive aggregate and analyse pertinent information about smallholder farmers, and then build credit profiles that can be used to produce real-time credit assessment. This then helps underserved smallholder farmers access credit and receive digital financial services.
Let's shift the focus to another country. The challenge that this next young innovator is trying to tackle is quite common to many countries and contexts: the lack of education opportunities, which is a huge threat to children's welfare and to social development.
Iman Usman is from Indonesia, which is the fourth-largest education system in the world, ranking 64th in terms of education performance (based on PISA results 2012). Iman founded Ruangguru.com, an award-winning, tech-enabled education provider. Ruangguru.com has developed various products and services, including the nation's largest online marketplace for private tutoring and group classes, and an online computerized test platform that enables students to access exam-prep materials for free.
And finally, we drive it home with a young innovator from China—Yinghao Jia, from Tsinghua University. The problem he is trying to solve is making long commutes (97-minutes per day on average) as efficient as possible to reduce the associated costs of energy and damages to the environment. Relying on multi-source traffic data, such as for taxis, buses and subways, he combined data-mining technology and scientific traffic modelling (or the data plus model for insiders) to create an application, named Green Pepper, that provides comprehensive and quantitative analysis for users to find an ideal home location and route choices.
