 Hello everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2014 webinar series. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with Matilde Ewine from One Dollar Glasses, Church Skolnick from Grit and myself. My name is Caroline Wyman, and I will be moderating today's webinar. When I'm not doing this, I work with Siemens Diftung, the foundation, where I'm a project manager for social ventures. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit more about today's webinar. Simple but intelligent solutions for people with health restrictions. Millions of people in developing countries face urgent needs and basic supply that can be met successfully through appropriate technological solutions. These solutions provide the chance to level out acute deficits and also offer vast opportunities to engage in independent economic business activities and income generation. The Empowering People Network Technologies for Basic Needs aims to make promising solutions accessible and to further their implementation. This webinar will introduce the network's approach to making appropriate solutions accessible, and we'll take a look at two project examples that effectively help people who live with health restrictions. Today I will be speaking alongside Matilde Ewine, business development manager at One Dollar Glasses and Church Skolnick, CEO and co-founder of Grit. We thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series generally. Yana Iranda of ASME, Holly Schneider-Brown and Michael Maider and Steve Welch of IEEE, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you. If anybody out there has any questions about the series, or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact them via email on the address visible on the slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we move on, we thought it would be a good idea to remind you about Engineering for Change and who E4C is. E4C is a global community of over 770,000 people, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs and social scientists who work together to solve humanitarian challenges faced by underserved communities around the world today, such as access to portable water, off-grid energy, effective healthcare, agriculture, sanitation and others. You're invited to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of the E4C's coalition, including professional societies like ASME, IEEE, ASCE, SWE and ASHRAE, as well as academic supporters like MAT's D-Lab International Development Agencies like USAID, Engineering Without Borders, USA and Practical Action. It also offers access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out the website to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. This free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field who bring innovative ideas and technology to bear on global development challenges. Information on upcoming installments in the series, as well as archived videos of past presentations, can be found on the E4C webinar webpage. E4C's next webinar will be on January 21st at 11 a.m. EDT. The topic will be climate change preparedness and resilience. Visit the E4C webinars page for registration details. If you're already an E4C member, you'll also be receiving an invitation to the webinar directly. Now, a few housekeeping items just before we get started. On the screen you're now seeing, there are a number of different widgets on the dashboard at the bottom. The group chat is where you will interact with your fellow attendees and post any comments about the webinar. The Q&A widget allows you to submit any questions for the presenters. The help widget is for inquiries about any technical difficulties with resources on how to use the software and FAQ. Share this allows you to share the link of this webcast with your friends and colleagues through 13 popular social media sites. And the Twitter icon allows you to post directly to Twitter. And lastly, the survey icon allows you to take our survey at any time. I know this is a lot, so always feel free to hover over the icon for an explanation. So, we do have quite a few people attending this seminar. So, let's see where everybody is from. Using the group chat, please type in your location. As I can already see, we do already have Bangladesh online, Burkina Faso, Germany, Uganda, the USA, Nicaragua and Sweden. So, we look forward to seeing more of those. During the webinar, you can use the group chat to type any remarks you may have and interact with your fellow attendees. Don't forget to use the Q&A window to type in your questions for the presenter. If you encounter any troubles viewing or hearing the webinar, you may want to try opening up webcast elite in a different browser. Also, feel free to access the help widget for technical help. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour, one PDH, for the session, please follow the instructions on the top of the web page, engineeringforchange-webinars.org. Also, please do make sure you take a moment to fill out the short survey. Your opinions are invaluable, of course, to the webinar series. Without your comments and suggestions, the webinar just wouldn't be what it is today. So, let me introduce today's presenters. I myself, apart from being the moderator, will be introducing to you the Siemens-Diftung and the Empowering People Network. I have been working in the area of basic needs and social entrepreneurship at the Siemens-Diftung since 2012. Together with the Empowering People Network team, I have set up the first Empowering People Award and I am currently in charge of project development in the area of social ventures in Africa and Latin America. One of my particular areas of interest is and has always been that of health and hygiene for consumers and communities. Our second presenter will be Matilde Ewine. Matilde joined the $1 glasses because she wanted to make a real difference in the field to the simple, efficient and life-changing project. She is using her 10 years of experience in international development and resource mobilization to support and expand the ODG partner network. Matilde is an agronomist by training and has been working for NGOs, bi and multilateral agencies as well as the private sector, coordinating the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of field projects. Most recently at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Our third presenter today is Tish Skolnick, the CEO and co-founder of Grit, a social enterprise that created the leveraged Freedom Chair, LFC, an all-terrain wheelchair for riders in developing countries. Tish graduated from the MIT in 2010 with an SB in mechanical engineering and a minor in applied international studies. At MIT, Tish became hooked on using her engineering skills for public service and she nowadays puts these skills to use in East Africa, Haiti and India, where the LFC was developed and tested. Now, in terms of timeline, I will spend a few minutes explaining to you our work at the Siemensstiftung and the approach taken by the Empowering People Network in supporting appropriate technological solutions for development. Matilde and Tish will then have about 12 minutes each to present the health solutions before we move on to a question and answer session of about 15 to 20 minutes. During the presentation, please feel free to already drop your questions into the Q&A widget. You will be reading them at the same time as we present and respond to them at the end of the webinar. So let me start with a short presentation of the Siemensstiftung. Siemensstiftung is the operational foundation of the Siemens Agi. Our headquarters are in Munich, Germany, but we support and run projects internationally with a focus on Europe, Africa and Latin America. We operate in the fields of basic needs, education and culture. To specify, Siemensstiftung is committed to technical and entrepreneurial solutions that can reduce existential deficits in basic services and strengthen social structures. In the area of education, we are committed to high-quality science education that enables the opportunities offered by technological advances to be leveraged responsibly. In the area of culture, we want to open up space in which artists can actively help to shape their societies and make a contribution to a successful community life. As I said, in the area of basic needs and social entrepreneurship, our goal is to help eliminate existential deficits. We do this by identifying, promoting and in some cases also running projects that have the potential to improve basic supply in developing countries. These projects that we aim to strengthen together with partners are always based on three principles, that is, appropriate technology, entrepreneurial models and training. These projects should also always have the potential to reach both a high social impact as well as financial sustainability. Now, in order to identify such projects, we launched the Empowering People Award in 2013. This award identified and gathered a whole range of intelligent and impactful technological solutions that have the potential to reach exactly these goals. Let me give you a brief insight into the results and also the benefits of the first Empowering People Award. The graph that you see on your left gives you an overview of the entries in the different award categories, such as food and agriculture, ICT, energy, water supply and wastewater treatment, waste and recycling or health. In total we identified over 800 solutions in around 90 countries of the world that are suitable and tailored to the conditions in developing and emerging countries. In the category health we had about 160 participants to the award. The response rate was really huge. So, in fact, I can already reveal to you at the stage that we will therefore most probably launch a new award in 2015. So, do keep your eyes open for that. So, what are the benefits of the Empowering People Award? Of course, there's price money to be won, but there's not only that. Most importantly, the winners benefit from the high visibility that they receive through the award. The idea is to share the solutions within the development world by different means. First of all, a catalogue is created. It is openly accessible for everybody and features the most efficient evaluated solutions. Secondly, we collaborate with other platforms in order to increase the products and the project's visibility worldwide. Thirdly, we offer intensified communication support through publications, social media and online campaigns. The long-term benefits for the winners of the Empowering People Award are three-fold. They receive the chance for networking, peer-to-peer and with partners of the Siemens-Stiftung. They receive individual advice and support for their organization. And they also receive opportunities for further qualification. But, of course, not only the winners of the award can benefit through tailored support activities by Siemens-Stiftung. All the other projects that have been evaluated as suitable and best practice models become part of the Empowering People Network. Out of the 800 proposed solutions to the award, 100 have been selected to date by technical and development experts and became part of the network. Now, within this network, people can participate in a range of activities and benefit from the following opportunities. Firstly, by being included in the network's solution database, projects are not only made visible, but we also aim at creating a network of partners around the project, both on the financial and the operative side, and to foster interaction. Next to this information and networking database, we also create opportunities for knowledge exchange and training. This happens not only online, but also offline. Offline, we, for instance, offer so-called Empowering People On-Site, which are regional workshops with network members. They always focus on a specific topic of interest to the participating organization and offer training for local employees of these organizations. On an international level, there are also the Empowering People workshop. The last one was held just two weeks ago in Mexico in the context of the Global Social Business Summit. And finally, we also back up our approach and methods by research work. We have a research network called IRIN-C, which provides us with a better understanding of the ecosystem of social businesses and of social investing. We also develop innovative tools and methods together with research institutions, such as, for example, the first assessment manual for social entrepreneurs, which is a practical tool for your own impact assessment and impact measurement. It will be published on our network online soon. So just to quickly summarize, let me just build some of the key elements that we believe in for promoting social entrepreneurs and promising technological solutions. Through the solutions database, as well as the online and offline workshops, we believe in the crucial power of visibility and connectivity. We aim at connecting partners at dialogue between social entrepreneurs, inventors, international organizations, as well as investors. We believe in the value of South-South exchange. And at the same time, research for practice, as well as qualification, are equally crucial in making technological solutions more accessible and more widely used. Now having given you just a brief overview of the Empowering People Network, I suggest that we move straight on to our first practice example, which is the $1 glasses, who are not only part of the Empowering People Network, but also won the first prize of the Empowering People Award. Thank you very much Caroline. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. I am Matilde Vance and I work for $1 glasses. 150 million people. This is more than the entire population of Russia. And this is the number of people who need glasses but do not have access to them. This means that some or most of them see like this instead of seeing like this. This has global consequences. It means that children cannot study. They cannot go to school. People cannot work or care for their family. This also has a major economic impact. The estimated loss of income due to provision is 120 billion US dollars. This is approximately the amount of the international development aid every year. So I think we can all agree that this is a pretty big problem and this can have a simple solution. And this is the mission of $1 glasses. What we want to do is to provide high quality glasses to all. We want the glasses to be affordable, locally produced, available widely, robust and individually customized. So this is what we're doing and what we hope to keep doing. So how does that work to have such glasses? Martina Othman, the founder of $1 glasses, created innovative main manual machines that allow you to transform a simple wire of stainless steel into a glasses frame. And this is what you can see on this picture. You can see the machine at work. The machine don't need any electricity. They are easy to use and after training us around one month and then exercising for another month you are ready to produce your own glasses. So here you have some of the picture of the machine and here you have a bit more of the process and so you can see the frame that is created and you can change the color of the frame. You can change the color of the beads on the frame and you can also change the color of the nose and the temples. So you can really create a really nice frame and people can choose the color that they like and on the frame it's really easy to click the lenses that are adapted to the vision of the client. Meaning that you can basically adapt each pair of glasses of different lenses for each of your eye, which is really important and not always available. So this is the production of the glasses and here is the result. So as you can see it fits as well on a young boy as on older people. The woman you can see down is 99 years old and this was the first pair of glasses she ever owned and she says she had never seen as well in her entire life. So what we are and what we want to develop is inclusive businesses. What we want to do is to bring this new simple technology where it is the most needed. We want to empower local people to produce and sell the glasses. So we really want the process to help an in-country creating local sustainable businesses. We don't want to import the glasses. And while doing that we want to ensure inclusiveness. We want to make sure that women are part of the training. We want to make sure that handicapped people can be part of the training. And we want also to make sure that we go really far from the town and in the remote area to reach as much as possible that people will really need the glasses that never have access to them. So we are working with the poorest for the poorest. So now to explain you a little bit better how this works and what happened concretely when Wandoa Glasses decided to engage in a country. So when we say when we arrive in a country basically there are three main things that we are looking at. First, setting up an organization. It's not necessarily our own organization. Usually we are partnering with people. So that's the setup of a local organization with a partner or not. There are the training of the production and the sales team. And so as I said these takes around three to five months and depends a little bit you have two to three period of training, two weeks training and the people train on doing the glasses. Between these periods it's really important that the quality of the classes is really high. It's something that is very important for Wandoa Glasses is not because they don't cost a lot of money because the raw material to produce the glasses costs only one dollar. And I will explain a bit later how they are sold. But they are made of material that is not really expensive and it's not for that that they should be of low quality. So this is the training and then we are trying to get all the government approval to make sure that it's legal and for us to work in the country and the government will actually help us with our projects. So when the organization is set up, the production and the sales are done and the ODG concept is approved by the government then we can go ahead and start a first pilot of producing and setting the glasses. And when this works we can then scale it up within the country through additional training that are done by trainers coming from outside or even trainer in country because each of the person that is trained by Wandoa Glasses needs to train other people so that we create a virtuous circle in country. So to give you a little bit more detail about how this work concretely in country so there is the initial investment that is linked to the training, bringing the machine to the country. The machine are loaned to the producer. They don't have to buy them and so there is all these initial investments and when the people are trained for the production and the sales the process can start. As I mentioned the raw material to create the glasses is only $1 and this is why they are called the Wandoa Glasses. Once the production is fine the eye testing can happen. So usually to do the eye testing we are partnering with ophthalmologists and opticians in country so that they can do the testing themselves during campaigns that are organized with them. Sometimes you really don't have enough opticians in country ophthalmologists. So then when it's legal the salespeople from the Wandoa Glasses do the eye testing by themselves during the campaigns. It's the case in different country. So the sales, the price of the glasses when they are sold are approximately $4 to $6 US and this depends on the country because this price basically covers the salary for the producer and the salary for the salesman as well as some money to buy new raw material and continue the cycle and make it a sustainable cycle. What is really important here is we are really not looking at people making a lot of money where we really want to keep the price of the glasses low so this is really an important part of the process. So here you can have a better idea of how this works in the country. So this is what's happening in the country and how does it relate to Wandoa Glasses in Germany because the project originated in Germany and the headquarter is there. So as you can see on the right side of the screen the ODG country is what I explain you. You usually have a country director as well as production and sales team to produce and sell the glasses. Wandoa Glasses in Germany for the moment we have two staff members and over 50 volunteers and it's growing every day. What we support is the initial investments to start the project in country what I mentioned earlier as well as setting up the local organization in country providing the trainings, providing the machines, engaging with partners. So this is the initial step before ODG in country starts. So when ODG in country starts then from Germany there is the quality control that is really important for us. We need to make sure that all the glasses are really well done and we control the prices as well. We want to make sure that nobody is going to sell the glasses for a higher price. That's what has been decided and we also provide best practices. So that's what ODG Germany does. When the raw material is sold by ODG Germany to the different ODG in country and when this raw material is sold there is a little fee that goes towards the functioning of one of the glasses Germany. Hopefully making it a sustainable system all around in the long run. So that's the system and to make it work we really need to rely on a lot of partner and I've seen that you are all coming from a different background. So I hope that each of you can find themselves in one of these boxes here and maybe see how we can actually better partner and make this project go even further. So we rely a lot on governments for the initial implementation like helping us to allowing us first to enter the country and then they can be a great help to help us actually distribute the glasses in country. We work very closely with the civil society with the NGO that often holds us and also the user and the self team are usually coming from the civil society. We work closely also with the private sector with the local opticians and ophthalmologists in country. They help us with the eye screening and also with the distribution channels. We are starting collaboration with different agencies of the UN and they are really good at bringing people together and also reaching a lot of people really fast. And finally we also rely a lot on investors because we are really sitting business in country that are self-sustainable. But in order to set up these businesses we need some investors and some philanthropic investors to help us actually be able to go in country and make the entire system work. And so we need help to scale up and scale out. So as of November 2014 we are active in nine different countries. This means that we producer training and have happened in all these countries and self-training as well. And we have starting selling the glasses in four of these countries already and up to now over the last few months and glasses have been sold proving really that the concept works. The machines are usable in country and people use them really well. They produce high quality glasses and there is really a demand because we knew there was a need but we didn't know if people were actually going to pay to get the glasses and we see that actually people are ready to pay to get the glasses. So this is where we are now. We know that the model is successfully tested. The production is feasible. People are ready to buy. But now what we really need to focus on is to improve the sales channel and also getting more philanthropic funds to replicate the model further within country and to other countries. So these are the two big focus for us now. So basically that's a bit of a conclusion. What we do is when the glasses support the poorest with the poorest as well as the health system it creates new sustainable jobs for the people who actually produce and sell the glasses but also for the people who receive the glasses and can finally see and maybe get the job for themselves now that they can actually see much better. It brings people back into school and employment. And we really love to, as you've seen we have a lot of volunteers and we're looking for a new partner to help us with the different aspects of the glasses, the production or the distribution channel. So we'll be really happy if you are excited by our project and you want to join us and discuss with us. So be a part of the solution. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for this very interesting presentation. We'll have time for questions later. To all the attendees please feel free to drop any questions you might have about the $1 glasses and I suggest we move on to Tish and the leverage Freedom Chair. Hi everybody, I'm Tish Skolmek, the CEO and co-founder of GRIT and our product is the Freedom Chair and I want to start off by introducing you to Ashok. We met him a few years ago in Jaipur in India and he had recently been climbing a tree and fallen out and sustained a spinal cord injury. And he was sent home from the hospital on the wheelchair you see him sitting in. It's a standard hospital-style wheelchair much like the one you see to the right that are distributed by some large nonprofits. Now while these seem like a good idea, they're really hard to push on the rough terrain in developing countries. They break easily and you can't fix them. The spare parts just aren't available in these countries. Which leaves people like Ashok and the 20 million other people just like him around the developing world really stuck at home. You know, unable to get to work or to school or to participate in their communities. So our team at MIT decided to come up with a solution. We looked at the ergonomics of really what could you push with your upper body. We looked at the type of terrain that people had to travel on. Everything from loose rocks and soil to steep grades. We looked at what parts were available and found that bicycle parts were really common that a repair structure already existed for that. We talked to hundreds of wheelchair users around the developing world to understand what their needs were, what their wants were, and really what they needed out of a product like ours. What we figured out was that you could really travel on this rough terrain if you could get more torque at the wheels. We could do this using a lever. We did a lot of research and testing and figured out that a lever between about 20 and 60 centimeters long allows you to get the maximum efficiency you want on smooth ground so you can travel really fast. It also gets you the peak power and the torque output you need to travel on really rough terrain. So we'll take a look at a video of it here in action. This is some footage from one of our users in India. You'll see when he pushes forward on the levers that pushes him forward. As he's gotten into this more challenging terrain he'll slide his hands up the levers. At the top of the levers you get more torque at the wheels and it's easier to power over those obstacles. In side-by-side testing it's 80% faster than a regular wheelchair on smooth ground and you can get 53% more peak torque at the wheels when you're climbing steep grades. They've designed it so that it is functional and usable both outdoors and indoors and by users of a variety of different ability levels. You can even do a wheelie. Now we didn't just hit upon the perfect solution our first time around. What you see now is the first prototype we built in 2008. Now the levers worked really well but we quickly found out that if you actually require a wheelchair transferring into this is very difficult being able to get yourself over that front wheel and it was also quite unstable at high speeds but the levers worked really well and people liked the ability to travel on really rough terrain. So we went back to the drawing board and back at MIT we took our lever drive train and basically welded it onto an office chair just to get a first-order test of how the levers worked. In that geometry the overall performance was greatly improved. We rounded out the rest of the elements and we took the next prototype to East Africa in 2009 for an extended field trial in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to get much more positive feedback. We still had a few things to work on bringing the weight down and the width down and in 2010 we worked with a partner in Guatemala and we're getting even more positive feedback. So this is the leveraged freedom chair as it is today. This is the show I introduced you to earlier in my talk and here he is in a leveraged freedom chair. The very next day after he received his freedom chair he went back into his village and he reopened a tailoring shop that he had been running prior to his accident. So the freedom chair like I said was designed by our team at MIT and is now managed and marketed through a startup that we founded called GRIP. Field tested in seven countries it features this patented lever drive train that we came up with and we couple that with a rugged three wheel frame which makes it really great on rough terrain and all of the moving parts so this means wherever you are even if it's a remote village somebody will be able to help you repair it and maintain it. We shipped just over a thousand of them this year. We sell to mostly NGOs, foundations, aid agencies folks like the Walkabout Foundation, the Red Cross, the World Bank we manufacture them at our contract manufacturer Pinnacle Industries in India and we shipped to about a dozen countries this year. Now while we were working on this and getting the leverage freedom chair out into the world we started to hear from writers in the United States who said it's really great that you've come up with such a rugged rough terrain chair and we want to also be able to move beyond the pavement. We're stuck on sidewalks with cobblestones and we want to go on the beach and be able to go on parks with our friends and family. So we took a look at the landscape of the US market and found that there are daily wheelchairs that are great for stores on flat terrain and there are some specific sports devices like hand cyclicals that people race in Marathon. But these aren't very versatile they're quite expensive and they're very difficult to transport. They don't, you know, fold or store in any sort of meaningful way. And there are 3 million wheelchair riders in the US. So we took the freedom chair that we had originally come up with with the lever drive train and the three wheel frame bike parts and we've redesigned it for feedback from wheelchair riders in the US. It's now easy to disassemble so you can flat pack it for shipping and you can also fold it to fit it in the trunk of a car. And then we're using bike parts that are more commonly found in the US. We recently launched a Kickstarter and we're a staff pick on the site. We've reached our funding goal but we're trying to stress it a bit further and would be happy that we'd appreciate you checking out our page later. So just a quick note about our team. We all met while studying mechanical engineering at MIT and then founded a startup shortly after graduation. We worked with a number of partners based in Boston and as well as partners around the world who helped us get to where we are today. Now looking forward we've got, you know, Gashok on the left who's riding our levered freedom chair in India and we've got Alan on the right who's been testing our new freedom chair for the US. And our next steps are leveraging design similarity so we can merge production and distribution. The original levered freedom chair is manufactured in India. The new freedom chair for the US market is currently being manufactured in the US and we think there are a lot of opportunities to merge that and start to get even greater economies of scale so we can pass on David to our customers. Over the past few years we've had some successes and some challenges. We've had a lot of success with our product design. We've really used this user-centric design process to really understand what our customers want out of the product. We have a manufacturing line in India that operates at steady state and we've now got repeat customers coming back for a second and third orders. So all that is great but we still have plenty of challenges. First and foremost we have two different products and two different markets and so from an operational perspective and also from a sort of branding and messaging perspective we really have to be on top of a lot. We're also managing a manufacturing operation overseas which comes with its own host of challenges and we're in the process of raising capital. A lot of these things cost a lot of money especially up front as you're getting manufacturing started and that's still a challenge in this space. So I'd love for you guys to check out our website the GoGrid.us site right now for which to do a Kickstarter page which will be live until this month for you to check it out and give us any feedback you have and you're also welcome to reach out directly to me. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much Tish. Thank you to you both for the really good presentations. I'm sure there's a lot of questions I would like to open up the floor for questions and answers right now. To all the attendees you can use the Q&A window which is located right below the chat window and type in your questions for the presenters here and then we'll try to answer as many questions as possible. I see a few questions have already come in. So there's a few questions about the empowering people network. I will maybe start with these. Maria is asking us could you please provide more information about the award? When will it be and how can my team take part? What are the main criteria? Well as I said it is most probably going to happen next year in 2005. Be careful when you, I've seen that some tweets have already gone out so this is also indicative. It will most probably be launched in June 2015. You can just wait until the call for applications is out and there will be an online procedure to follow for your application. Now in order to be one of the first to hear about the award I would invite you to subscribe to our newsletter which is called the empowering people update. To find that you can just go on our webpage of the empowering people network and there you click your way through to newsroom and then EP update registration. Another possibility is to follow us on Facebook. Just type in Empowering People Network on Facebook or to follow us on Twitter and our Twitter name is mppl-award and I believe that you see that on your screen right now as well. You've been asking about the criteria but as I said nothing is totally fixed so I can only make rough indications. The criteria will presumably be the same as in the first award. You should be able to take part as an individual, as a team, as an organisation or a social enterprise from any region of the world. The product or solution submitted should always be already tested and in use and of course there's a list of criteria that the jury will apply and last time these were five criteria, the potential of the approach in making contribution to solving basic supply problems of course then the technical feasibility, the social business concept also with regards to job creation and replicability the fourth is financial sustainability and the fifth is applicable environmental performance. Another question I suggest that I just pick out another question about the network and then I see the questions for the leverage freedom chair and one dollar glasses are coming in as well so we'll move to that. I'm supporting a project on household energy solutions in Rwanda. How could the Empowering People Network help me in finding relevant partners for my work? Well it really depends on the kind of partners you're looking for. If you're looking for technical partners or specific products for example in your case lighting products or cooking solutions for households then you can just browse through our solutions database that you will find on the Empowering People Network site. You can filter via the keyword energy for example and you'll be able to find several products and organisations that are active in that field and you'll also find that contact details there so you can get in touch directly. Now if you're looking for implementing partners or financing partners for example there are several options that you have as a member of the Empowering People Network. Of course you can be invited to one of the networking events which I mentioned in my presentation earlier on but of course you're also always welcome to just drop us an email and then we'll put you in touch with the relevant partners from our network. I have a question for the $1 glasses here and that's regarding the cost structure of your product. If $1 is the cost of material $5 to $6 seems like $5. Maybe you can say a bit more Matilda about how this cost is set up. Thank you very much Caroline. So $1 is the cost of the raw material but you'll have to add to this the local taxes on the material first which added a little bit and then it's between $4 and $6. It really depends on the country and the salary in country but then it's not really a margin. We're absolutely not looking at making profit so the way the price is established is really looking at how much shall we pay the people that produce and sell the glasses and usually they're actually paid depending on the number of glasses they produce and they sell and trying to understand how much they can produce and sell for months and give them a decent salary. Actually there is no, you can call it margin but there is no profit really made on this. It's the cost of producing and selling the glasses and then buy new raw material to continue the project. So we're really paying attention to keeping it as low as possible and it's important to realize that if you look at all the glasses that are available in country they are easily for $60, $80, $100 and they are mostly available only in the capital city. So here we're looking at a device that is really much, much cheaper and is available much more easily and widely. Usually also when you need a pair of glasses you need to go to the ophthalmologist and then go back two weeks after to get the glasses here. The glasses are already in country so there are a lot of advantages to the system that I think are great above from the price itself. Please answer the question. I hope so too. If not maybe just send us a new question into the Q&A. I think this was Mr. Reiner. I have another question for you Matilda. Samira is saying hello I came in a bit late. I want to ask how the $1 glasses deal with rust as I guess it is metal. Yeah that's a really good question. Actually I've never seen a rust on the glasses. On this pen they steal the rust. There is no rust problem. Actually we just had a survey from our clients done in one of the country and this has never been mentioned as a problem but they might have seen in the glasses. Actually they were really happy about the product and its quality and robustness. So for the moment it's not a problem we have to deal with. Now we have a question for Tish. Have the mobility devices been independently tested and approved by any accredited third party standards and testing organizations such as ANSI? Yes we've put the leverage freedom carriers through the Resna testing with a whole bunch of double drum tests and weight drops. We did that with a group at the University of Pittsburgh called Hurl, the Human Engineering Research Laboratory. Yes the original design has been through that test and passed. The new design which we're releasing in the US market we're going through the testing right now. So we are taking care of all of those. We also have a fair number of our own tests that we do internally as well but it's important to get those third party standards met. And I see there's another question that's come in asking if we've thought about designing for local production as local labor usually adds local value. We completely agree. We've looked at a model where our wheelchair would be built from scratch in all these different countries and the challenge is keeping the cost down. By centralizing the manufacturing we can reach an economy of scale and really bring cost down. We can get more of these to people who need them. Now what we've done though is we're parent for our central manufacturing with local assembly. So the wheelchairs are manufactured. The parts are manufactured at our contract manufacturer in India and their ship disassembled. And then local labor does the final assembly and then the fitting and distribution of the chairs. So it's sort of the hybrid model that we've hit upon that meets all of our needs. Okay, thank you. I see, Matilda, that Reiner has written back to us. The new raw material to buy is already covered by the one dollar. Four to five dollar profit or salary seems quite a lot in these countries. Maybe you can just explain the other costs that are related to setting up a project and how this fits into the... Actually it can sum much but it's not that much if you want to offer to people decent salary. It depends also on how many glasses you can produce per day. And the average is between 10 and 15 pair per day. So maybe that's where the challenge comes from in terms of number because it's not like if someone could produce 100 pair of glasses per day. And depending on the country also the production rate really defares. So some people are just able to produce more quickly quality glasses. So if you want to give decent salary for people knowing that the team is the producer and the salesperson and you also have to cover the cost of people who manage the entire team and also something I didn't mention, like the building where they work. They have a lot of cost actually to cover just to be able to run the business. So actually it's not such a huge margin if you consider the number of glasses that are produced and sold per day and it's really important for us that they make a living out of it. I'm not saying they're going to be rich but we want to make sure that they can actually provide for their families through these new businesses. So I don't think the margin is extraordinary considering all these goals. I hope it's answered a bit better otherwise we can continue the conversation on the separate forum. I'm sure you can get in touch by email if there's more deep discussions that are needed. I think it's important to keep in mind that this is a solution for developing country and that of course in comparison to other products that are on the market it's important to keep in mind that the material costs are just lower than in comparison to the overall price. Anyway I'm sure you can continue the debate on email. I have another question for you. I support an NGO which runs a program where eyeglasses are donated to secondary school students at Eba Don, southwestern part of Nigeria. Is there any way we could collaborate because the funding is killing? Let's discuss that. I think you might have seen my email or we can share it more widely. For the moment we don't have activity in Nigeria but it's something we can discuss straight to understand how we could support you on the important work that you are doing. There's another question for you. Maria is writing, for the leverage freedom chair, can anyone order a chair in the US? Somebody else has been asking me how can I buy a leverage freedom chair? Yes, so for the original product that we're offering for developing countries, orders go directly through us. Our minimum order quantity outside of India is 20 units. We generally say it's 100 but I'm happy to work with smaller units for any of you. Then for the new freedom chair that we've launched in the US, you can pre-order it on Kickstarter. We'll start making deliveries between May and July of 2015 but the pre-order on Kickstarter is the best way to lock in the lowest price and get free shipping in the US. After starting January 1st in the US, you'll place orders directly on our website. I hope that answers your questions about ordering but again feel free to reach us directly by email for any other questions related to ordering. We have five more minutes for any questions there might be maybe in the attendee list. Right now I don't see any questions coming in. I wait for another half minute otherwise maybe I'll just ask questions myself. I do see there are some other questions. Does the network provide funding for projects? How can I get funded by the Siemens Stiftung? How can I apply to get sponsored? I was expecting a question like this. Well it's important to say that the Siemens Stiftung is an operative foundation and is therefore unfortunately not able to provide monetary funding as such. Our resources are currently committed to medium and long term projects and therefore we always have to ask for understanding that we cannot provide or fund additional projects. But the Empowering People Network provides is also not funding as such what it can offer are all sorts of other types of support which if translated in terms of money are very high monetary value. These can be as I explained in my presentation the participation and training sessions like the Empowering People Onsides, the workshops which bring together social entrepreneurs, inventors, international organizations to network. In terms of financing what we can also offer is basically to assist and advise our network members in the application for funds from different types of donors such as public organizations or grant giving foundations or also impact investors for example. I hope that answers the question. A few questions from Yves Goulouma. What's the criteria for inclusion in the training? For example, do people have to know how to read and write? The second question, the training lasts for about one month how are you working around time constraints and the work burden and the rest of the question is cut off but maybe you can answer that one. The first one is the criteria for inclusion in the training. We don't have criteria we really want to be as inclusive as possible and to work on the machine you don't need to know how to read and write. There are really simple machine and pretty much anybody can do the glasses. You need to be precise and that's why it takes some time to make them really perfectly but it's a manual job so you don't need to read and write. So that's important thanks for asking this question. The second about the time constraints, I guess what you mean is how do we get people involved for a month. When we start the training usually we have 30 people to start the production training and at the end more or less 6 people finish the training and actually are able to produce to the quality that we are expecting. Depending on the country, in some countries the trainees come to the training because otherwise there is no other option and in some countries we actually have to provide salaries to the trainees while they are trained. That is also something that needs to be founded through the NGO and the donation that we can get for that. So if this was part of your question in terms of timing usually you have 2 sessions you have 2-2 week sessions of training and they are separated by 2-3 weeks of non-training where people do the glasses by themselves and the frames are checked by a specialist either in country or in Germany. So I hope this answers your question and I see that there is a precision on your question. My focus is on the work burden of especially women. Do you mean that it's just too much time focused on the training? I'm not fully sure, I understand the question. Maybe she can specify the question in an email to you. The emails I mentioned here on the slide I'm just looking at the time and I think we slowly have to wrap up. So maybe it's probably the most efficient if you get in touch via email about this one. Thank you very much. I'm a tilt for the very interesting presentation. Thank you also to everybody who attended. I see that a number of questions have come in in the last few minutes and unfortunately we have not been able to answer all of them but we do so via email. So just drop on a line on the email addresses that are indicated on the presentation. Finally again a big thank you to Engineering for Change and for giving us the opportunity to present on here. Have a good day, evening, afternoon, out there, wherever you are. Thank you for joining us.