 Good afternoon to all and welcome to the first day of live pitching for the Global South COVID-19 Digital Innovation Challenge as part of the Global Innovation Forum 2021. My name is Yulia Lozanova and I'm delighted to monrate today's pitching marathon. Stay with us until the very end as we will discover together some fabulous solutions that can bring value to the lives of communities in developing countries around the world. Before we begin, a couple of things to keep in mind. This session will be brought live to you on Swapcard. I invite you to use the chat to comment and to connect with each other. Please use our hashtags, rediscover innovation and ecosystem building to join the conversation on the social media. In addition to being live streamed, this session is recorded and will be made available on the ITU website and the Swapcard event space. Before the pitches begin, let me say a few words about the challenge. The Global South COVID-19 Digital Innovation Challenge was launched in June 2021 in collaboration with the United Nations Office for South-South Corporation as part of the ITU Innovation Challenge. The Global South COVID-19 Digital Innovation Challenge identified scalable, innovative digital solutions that can enable countries, societies, communities, institutions and individuals from the Global South to deal with the cascading effects of the pandemic. From the over 250 challenge applications, a selection committee of 40 experts picked up the top 25 projects based on a set of evaluation criteria to determine the best innovative solutions to promote a return to normalcy in the aftermath of COVID-19. Those criteria include the relevance, adaptability, sustainability, viability, partnership and impact. We've set the bar high but the quality of the nominations have been outstanding. Today we will hear from 12 of the 25 shortlisted projects and the remaining 13 will screen tomorrow. Based on the live pitches, 10 will be chosen. The winners will be announced on Friday, 29 October, during the session bringing it all together. I would now like to invite one of the patrons of the challenge, Ms Xiaodun Grace Wong, Deputy Director at the United Nations Office for South-South Corporation to give her welcoming remarks and set the scene for today's pitches. Grace, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Yulia. Distinguished guests, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed a great pleasure for me to welcome you today to this very exciting life event to hear the presentations of solutions to our digital innovation challenge and select the winners. This challenge launched jointly by ITU and UN Office for South-South Cooperation is meant to identify, share, support cooperation and scale up solutions that leverage digital technologies to address the development challenges we all face today, especially in the context of responding to and recovering from COVID-19 and its social economic impact. I would like to thank, take this opportunity to thank ITU for their excellent collaboration and thank all the distinguished panel of experts for volunteering their time and expertise. We all know as the worksheets this focus and resources towards tackling the urgent COVID-19 crisis, digital technology and connectivity has become a critical enabler for our everyday life, economic activities and social interactions. However, depending on where you are, who you are, some people's experience can be very far removed from this connected life that you and me can enjoy today. According to the ITU, 3.6 to 7 billion people, nearly half of the world population do not have access to internet, the majority being girls and women. 2.2 billion of the unconnected are located in the Asia Pacific and 425 million in Africa, 121 million in Arab states. Globally, women are 20% less likely than men to use mobile internet, translating into over 1 billion women who are not using mobile internet. Moreover, in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, women are 20 to 50% less likely than men to use the internet to participate in public life. The vast digital divide can be attributed to infrastructure gaps, network coverage, affordability of broadband services or digital literacy levels, policy environment, et cetera, et cetera. Indeed, challenges are everywhere and many from access, usage, capacity, yet the solutions are not beyond average. Digital transformation can benefit all if all partners work together, including through South-South and triangular cooperation. While developing countries are deeply impacted, the crisis has created an impetus for innovation as well and the necessity to tap into broad networks for knowledge, ideas, and solutions. Innovation abound in the global South and North by incorporating existing and developing new digital solutions and ICT services to tackle the impact of the pandemic. South-South and triangular cooperation can play an important role in forging partnerships and tapping into the knowledge, expertise, technology, and resources available in developing countries. South-South and triangular cooperation in partnership with developed countries as well, coupled with embracing new and innovative approaches, presents such an opportunity to respond to this crisis and recover from it. Digital transformation has remained central to UNOISSC's work. We have convened policy dialogues in this area, producing knowledge products, collecting good practices, developing research, and providing in-depth analysis and policy recommendations for the potential on digitalization for development progress in the global South. Many in collaboration with our excellent UN partners such as ITU. You can find all this knowledge and connect with like-minded partners on our South-South Galaxy platform and also the ITU platform as just mentioned by earlier. With this digital innovation challenge, we really look forward to not only identify those solutions, but also to form partnerships to work together in scaling up those solutions to benefit more people. In the end, I would like to congratulate this excellent 25 short-listed organizations and institutions who will be presenting at the pitch live event today and tomorrow and wish them all the best for the final round of this competition. Yet, I would also like to say any competition as such has its own scope, criteria, and focus. Therefore, for those who have participated but not got the opportunity today, let us all continue pursuing the journey to unlock the challenges of our times and future generations leveraging what the times can offer to us the digital technology. This is the technology at our hand, yet the wisdom we all share. So let's work together for a better future. Thank you all. Thank you so much Grace for those inspiring words and for grounding the initiative in the work of the broader UN family and in a development perspective. You said the solutions are not beyond our reach and this is indeed a very good start for the pitching session because we're going to be using that initiative as a launchpad for innovative solutions indeed. So thank you very much for your effort for your words. And before we pass the floor over to our very talented innovators for the pitching, I would like to recognize the experts, the experts forming the jury of the Global South COVID-19 Digital Innovation Challenge. I think all of you in the jury have your cameras on, but if this is not the case, please turn them on so we can so everyone can see you. And I will go through the list of the jurors in an alphabetical order. The jury is composed by the following experts Ms. Fonsa Diani, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at Broadband Infrako, Mr. Arne Hussar, Senior Public Management Specialist at the Asian Development Bank, Mr. Sameh Hussain, Senior Coordinator at, okay I lost my mind, Senior Coordinator of Technical Corporation for Africa, excuse me, at the Islamic Development Bank, Mr. Rajat Kumar, Tech Policy and Innovation Lead at the Friedrich Neumann Foundation for Freedom, Ms. Victoria Maran, Venture Partner at Expedodio, Mr. Jonathan Naidu, the CEO of Smart Exchange, Mr. Gayan Peries, Head of Data and Technology at UNDP, and Ms. Sylvia Paul, the head of the Digital Society Team at the International Telecommunication Union. I can see the jury cannot wait to hear the pitches, so off we go. I will be calling upon each of today's finalists to present their pitches in four minutes. We will then have the jury ask questions to clarify the idea, the purpose or the solution. We will be giving a maximum of nine minutes for questions and clarification points. And now we're ready to start. Our first innovator comes from Cambodia, Mr. Mok Radhi, and he will pitch the stop COVID scan QR code for the safety of the country. Mok, the floor is yours. Julia, excuse me, that we don't have Cambodia here. Okay, should we then proceed with Chile? We already had Joanna on the call, so most definitely I will call upon Johanna Lorraine Cabrera Medina to present her project, Blossom. Hello, good morning. I'm going to share right now my presentation. Can you tell me if this is showing already? Yes, we can see your presentation. Okay, thank you. I'm going to start. Hello, my name is Johanna Cabrera. I'm CEO of Blossom and also Dr. in Psychology. The 21st century has brought social, economic, environmental, and political issues affecting critical health in general, and thereby increasing mental health disorders with serious personal costs, suffering, discrimination, and social ones in appropriate social interactions, conflict, violence, etc. This critical issue is equal to all the populations regardless of their demographic characteristics. It is estimated that close to one billion people in the world are living with a mental health disorder, and this added to their repercussions that COVID-19 is having in billions of people over the world. So these numbers tend to double. Even more so, when most of that education or curriculum in the world does not include education in social and emotional intelligence. Our solution, Blossom, is developing a complementary and self-directed service that seeks to support that process of promotion and prevention of mental health and quality of education through a psychology educational model. It is offered to an app for smart devices such as smartphone watches, smart speakers, and uses visual and immersive technologies for training to simulation and artificial intelligence for personalization. Initially, it is designed to help adults between 18 and 45 in Spanish-speaking Latin America to acquire social-emotional skills and increment well-being. Blossom offers pre-diagnostic, psychoeducation, and impact evaluation, considering science, ethics, cultural sensitivity, gamification in the arts, and knowledge process. Our business model considers B2C free immune for Play Store and App Store to match for qualified professionals, if necessary, but to rank them also and be part of a community for well-being. We have B2B for premium for psychologists that will be advertising space for them. It will match accordingly to speciality and also to the B2C need. Also, it will facilitate a patient's management through the testing. We will have revenues for B2C, B2C, and advertising sales. Escability, this product is completely adaptable to many areas such as psychology, education, medicine. We have won $1,111,000 and we're searching for investors. We also want to have very clear metrics on effectiveness and business. Our solution, well, we have won several contests in Chile. We have also won and be recognized at international level and we are building alliances with universities in Chile and Honduras. This is part of our prototype. We already have a functional prototype. What we want to do is to prototype, design an algorithm, new psychological content, incorporate VR and ER, and to test the prototype in both Honduras and Chile. Blossom Science, Innovation, and Technology Diplomacy. I'm a science diplomat and we want to work with different actors to win-win technology transfers but also co-creation. In this sense, we have a passionate team of Honduras and Chileans currently working hard for this to happen. I invite you to support Blossom, Emotion and Social Intelligence for Global Mental Health. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Joanna. That was very timely. You timed it really well. Thank you very much for that very insightful presentation. I will turn now the floor over to the jury and we will take any question they may have to you. Okay, we have four hands. I'll go in the order. Mr. Sameh Hussein, please, the floor is yours for the question. Thank you. Thank you for a very informative presentation and also good work in in the solution itself. My question is about the adaptability. I mean, please explain the solution was already... Sorry, I don't... It was froze, the camera, sorry. We had a little bit of an overlap of the sound because of the different speeds of the connection. Maybe I can just bring Johanna up to speed. The question was around adaptability of the projects. Okay, yes, in that sense. Johanna, if you don't mind, let's take all the questions that with the jury and then you can address all of them at once. Thank you very much. Sameh, would you like to add something to your question? Yeah, just adaptability based on the context of several countries because such apps are usually developed in one country, but we are talking about adaptability in several countries. And also, if they can't clarify, if it was implemented outside its country of origin. Thank you, back to you. Thank you very much. Johanna, we will address that question just in a minute. I will give the floor now to Jonathan, please, for your question. Thank you, Madam facilitator. My question is seeking clarity on the partnerships that you talk about around this, etc. But can you clarify precisely what partnerships you have in the South-South? Thank you. Thank you very much. Jonathan, Fumza, over to you. Thank you very much. Sorry, I had a slight delay there. My question is on the sustainability of the solution. Firstly, well done on the team on what you put through, it's very convincing. How will you attract customers on the B2C model and how will you ensure that they stay on board and use the services? What is your go-to-market plan? Thank you very much, Fumza. Sylvia, over to you. Thank you, Julia. And I would like to ask two questions that are also a bit related to the adaptability. If I heard correctly at the very end, Joanna, you said that this was a global solution. But you are mostly covered working in Latin America, so I imagine that this tool is for now only in Spanish. So how, if you're calling it a global solution, how will you make it global? And also imagine in relation to languages. And my second question is, if you're one of the winners, what would you do with the funding, with the seed funding? What is your plans for that? Thank you, Sylvia. Important questions in these. And we have a last question from Rizat. Please. Thank you very much. So, John, I first write off the bad congratulations. It's a really interesting project. I'm a psychologist myself by training, so it really resonates with me. And on that line, I'd actually like to add on what Mr. Hussain said earlier about the adaptability. As you can understand, the specific context and the local scenarios within different countries determine the way that they approach issues of mental health. So I think that I definitely want to add on to Mr. Hussain's question of the adaptability. And how do you see that sort of engage? Because I mean, you can still make an argument that to a certain extent there are broad stroke similarities between the cultures of various Latin American countries and the social fabrics between them. But how do you now try and make that a truly global solution by, let's say, moving into Asia, where the social fabric and the cultural norms are significantly different around mental health? Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Johanna, yes, over to you. Please address all those questions. I'm eager to answer. Okay, first of all, the adaptability. Yeah, this is a thing we are trying to start first in Latin America because the issues, right, and the topics, but also blossom considers that are global, for example, or prototype is considering the five universal emotions, right? We're taking those that are completely to all. And we actually need to adapt these to also not only content, but also visibility in terms of color of skin. And also, we are trying this algorithm that we're trying to create must have these changes in Spanish. We have many types of words to refer to one thing like frutilla and strawberry and many others. So with the algorithm, we could, you know, have some set of already words that are identified to change. And with cultures such as as Asia, right, that are completely different to Western research is important. And we need to work with psychologists in those areas, because we have different names for languages, we have different ways to express. So we need to work with the specialist in the cultural area of each of these realities. This is in terms of the adaptability, right? And like I tell you, the global mental health, we're trying to go to those problems that are similar, right? We are starting with that. And we are prevention and promotion, we are not treatment. This is very important to say, right? And like I tell you, research in that in the in the in the cultural realities is basic to create new knowledge, because we don't have that. And we can use, okay, so clarity about the partnerships in Chile. Well, I'm Honduran, right? I'm an ex former diplomat. I'm science diplomat, but I triple I S on the twice. I'm also vice president and confounder of the host Honduras. So I am as you can and I'm also a professor in the research in the University of Santiago, Chile, where blossoms incubated. And right now, we have alliances in this moment with the University of with the group of neuroscience applied neuroscience of the University of Honduras, to national national Honduran University. We also have contacts in here with the brain lats, that is of the University Adolfo Ibanez, they already tested a functional prototype and they told us that they want to create something together, right? Uniting forces, they would be beneficial by developing and taking this service to the community, but also to do research. And I can continue. I can continue, but since I am in this international ambit, I have a lot of networks. And also the sustainability. Yes, in here in Chile, we already have like it since I'm in a university, you know, I have tried to access to all that information. My thesis created blossom my PhD thesis. So I we talked with the MBA of the University of Santiago in Chile and we told them we we are not so good in in in in in business. For example, myself, I'm a train sciences, you know, for my diplomat. So for Tessie's have been working on the business model in Chile, initially, and work in the worst scenarios. Blossom has a good with psychologists. And like I tell you, we already have been having interest from another university to make a prototype for children, for adolescents, and for adults with the the information that we get with this first prototype that we're testing right now. So the business model must be adapted to the reality. Honduras has completely different realities. For example, we don't have so much training in psychology is over there. So we need to seek another maybe a from education perspective, we need to study that further. And that's some of the things we want to do. And, and well, what what what else am I missing? What we will do if we win this? First of all, we want we already am testing our prototypes. So we want to scale the testability to real life conditions in Chile, but also in Honduras. And with the partnerships we're doing, we already had also contact with the ambassador of Chile in Honduras. And he's thrilled to be able to contribute to this because it's completely innovative for Honduran to be me a Honduran scientist woman. And now entrepreneurship and with this amazing team in here. We are Hondurans and Chileans, we have the networks, we have the passion, we have the knowledge, and we cannot do it. We know who to contact to to get that information and the best quality of work and in human talent. Thank you very much, Johanna. And maybe you would like to say something about sustainability. I didn't hear anything about that. Yeah, related to sustainability. Yeah, related, related to sustainability, we must understand that emotional and social intelligence also is basic to contribute to the taking care of the environment, pro ambience. This has to do with compassion, with limits, with care. And we also have a thinking there that is like psychology and behavioral sciences for change of behaviors for also a public policy, but we focus on behavior, right? That's for us are many one of our impact indicators. Thank you very much. Indeed. Do the jurors have any clarification points? We have two more minutes. Yes. So Arne, over to you. Yes, I wanted to request you to give us a snapshot of a user journey on your app. Give us one function of what a user would experience when using it. Yeah, for example, in here, this is like, this is like the blossom tree, right? The blossom tree where we have different activities. And so you come in here and you talk to Lara, who is our boss, so our psychological guide, and she tells, okay, you're going to do a little test right now. Because once you know how is your aesthetic state. So there goes, right? The first test. And then they do the first test, and they have a reward. The idea is this is gamified. And then they enter to little capsules of training. This training can be a little movie, little movie, short movie, or can be our experience for training, you know, like if I'm scared to ask for help to my father, I could visualize a male figure and practice over there. And also then we have like, you know, we have psychoeducation, we have training through simulation. And finally, we also have meditations before and after. So we are starting to see that how is people changing actually, you know, and then we offer them information and gamification, and also entertainment. We need to focus a bit more on entertainment, in well-being, in pleasure, and in other good mental states. Thank you, Joanna. A last point from Rajat, really quickly, because we're running out of time. Yeah. So what's the conversion rate throughout the various stages of the journey? So when someone signs on to when they engage on the first level. Yeah, the prototype, we have it for 15 minutes, for 15 minutes, but we already have feedback that is too long, but they like it. But they say, you know, the capsule should be a little smaller, like three minutes, like something really fast, you know, I'm going to the metro and want to see that. So we're getting a good feedback, but also we know we will have to change this. And right now it's just in minutes, but we want to do it less, of course, for experience, you know, we can have like the compassion, the blossom tree, etc. Thank you very much, Joanna. That was very comprehensive, very well done. Thank you very much. And what's a pleasure for me to be here? And kindly, I would like to connect with all of you. Thank you. It was a pleasure to have you. And now we will move on to the next innovator. And we will stay in the same region, Latin America. And we will hear from Adeline Padilla from Colombia on the Olab Learning Without Borders, Colombia, Nigeria. Do we have Adeline with us? Yes, well, actually, I'm the founder of Olab. Adeline couldn't join us because she was really sick today. So I'm Tania Rosas, I'm going to be joining you guys today. I know that's okay with you. That's perfectly fine. We're very happy to have you, Tania. The floor is yours. Thank you so much. So I'm sharing my screen right now. I'm Tania Rosas, as I mentioned. I'm the founder of Olab. We developed a technology to make education inclusive and accessible for everyone in across the global south. So it started as my university thesis. I come from the Nigeria region of Colombia, which is called La Guajira. And there we have the highest school dropout rates, then also the highest stream poverty levels in my country. So I'm an educational researcher. I was trying to understand what was going on in my region, why we still have the highest levels in stream poverty. And I found out that many of the youth that were dropping out was because they didn't have support at home. Their parents didn't went to school. They didn't have access to connectivity or access to educational platforms to allow them to just improve the quality of education. So I was testing many educational platforms, all of them, and any or none of them work because that was a really vulnerable contest. So we decided to create our own technology, which is called Olab. And then we started in 2015, providing access to inclusive personalized and accessible education for all the young girls in my region. Because if a young girl in my region is out of school, it affects whole communities. So we really want to improve access to education in order to access and improve the quality of life in our communities and create sustainable solutions for our communities. So we empowered them with the knowledge and the tool that they required to just succeed in this modern world. And then in 2020, I was selected by the United Nations as young leader for the SDGs. And I have been getting many requests for organizations across the world asking us to use our technology. So then last year, we started creating our first pilot projects in Philippines, Pakistan, South Africa, and then other countries in Latin America such as Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru. We have been getting great success. And there have been many young people accessing too many resources co-created by universities and also companies that want to allow them to access to young opportunities. But most importantly, for me, it was really exciting that many of those youth were creating their own entrepreneurship projects and creating a sustainable solution for their own communities. So our technology is not only about providing education or just empowering local teachers or local schools. We really want the students to access to and knowledge that they will not access if they are just not connected. So we have, our technology actually is very different from others. We developed a learning management system that is adaptable and it is easy to use for any local teacher in any local school across the world. We focus on the design and we make sure that even those teachers who didn't know how to use a computer before, they were able to create interactive content and to access to those resources through our platform in a few minutes. So it was really exciting because last year we actually allowed many local teachers across the global south to create their own content and ensure that no one was left behind in their communities for the, when the school closed. And then we also have an offline learning platform and app that is customizable to any language, any culture and any context. Even our avatars look like the people in the community, even the local teachers. So we really want to create that engagement and this allow the students to see themselves through technology. Our business model relies on partnership with the universities and institutions worldwide. They create content in our platform to allow for research and also social projection. We also partner with corporations and NGOs across the world that have educational projects in many communities and then they use our technology to provide their own social projects and also to empower local teachers. And we train local teachers in rural schools even remotely and then can also access to training offline so that they can use our technology to provide digital education for their own communities. We really want to empower local teachers and to include them in this digital revolution because none of them, and many of them didn't have access to digital skills. And then we also have access. Can I please ask you to wrap it up because we're at the end of the four minutes already. Okay, thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. You can have a few seconds to finish. That's okay. Just if we can make it a little bit speedier. Thank you. We saw that, yeah, thank you so much. We saw that more than 80 percent of the students that were accessing to our technology were able to continue in education and also to access to many resources created by universities across the world. So with this grant, we are working with the Wadi Foundation in Nigeria to provide access to more than 10,000 youth in their community. And we are scaling to South Africa as well. We really want to reach any youth that want to access to digital education through our platforms. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Tanya. And I'm sure you will have the opportunity to provide more context in responding to the questions of the jurors. I'm turning now to the jury. Are there any immediate questions coming up? I see Fumza. The floor is yours. Please. Thank you very much, Tanya, and very well done on your presentation. You started off very well, Tanya, and I was looking at finding out, you said you tested a number of these solutions. What is your unique value proposition that makes your solution different to all the others that are currently in the market? And secondly, I hear that there is a part where the universities provide the content. Is that linked to any curriculum or how do you manage the alignment of that content to the curriculum? Yeah. Thank you so much for that question. That was something I wanted to add. Thank you. Tanya, we will just go through all the questions and then I will let you answer those at once like this. We will try to optimize time we have. Jonathan, over to you for your question. Tanya, my question pertains to the business model. I couldn't clearly understand the revenue side of it. I could see no numbers pertaining the revenue. Please clarify that. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. That's an important side of things indeed. Sylvia. Thank you very much. Yeah, my question is also again to adaptability. I know you mentioned then some work that you're planning to do in Nigeria and Africa, but I assume that the original platform is in Spanish. If you're working, I understand only in Colombia. So if you can clarify, if you are working more countries in Latin America and also share a bit more about the content, because are you talking about basic digital skills? Are you talking about what type of educational platform and content do you have? And you just mentioned that some of these girls went on to further their education. Does that mean that this motivated them to finish their high school and then go to university? But I understand the content. And if this is now in Spanish and if this is something you would like to, as you say, by partnering with other countries in Africa, will this also be done in English? Thank you, Sylvia. Those are important practical aspects indeed. Sami, over to you for your question, please. Sorry, I muted. This is more elicited to the last question. You know, in such kind of solution, you have to maintain the balance between flexibility and adaptability and also the focus of the solution. We hear the many, or you are encouraging many contributors to both e-contents, universities, community members, teachers and all of that. So what is, do you have a focus type of content or are you just trying to do some sort of crowdsourcing of the knowledge under one platform? Thank you very much, Sami. Rajat. Tania, thanks so much. So my question is more with regards to the technical devices and the access issues, right? So you mentioned that you're going to be shipping these devices. What is the life cycle of these devices? Is there continued sort of support in terms of the software to keep it updated? What's the cost of procuring these devices? What happens to them at the end of their life cycle? That's also important because we don't want to unnecessarily generate additional e-waste. And the last is, I also see in your application that you're talking about also sending out hotspots. So what is the cost that you have to bear for providing access to the internet? And do you see that sort of reducing in the long run as governments as private enterprises start increasing their rollout in the last mile? Thanks very much. Thank you very much, indeed. Technical questions really going into the members and the practicalities. And Victoria, the last question would be for you. Congratulations for what you built. It's very, very impressive. My question, I think everybody asked all the questions that I had. However, I want to know about your team and then relating to the cost of operation of building the device. I want to know in the future, are you going to use the team are strong enough to build something that it works without any internet as well in those areas because you talked about hotspots. So I want to know whether the tech team, what is the background around the tech team that enables us to think about the future and how we can be more efficient. Thank you very much, Victoria and now Tanya, it's over to you to address all the questions we heard. Thank you so much. So first, our platform are customizable. Anything that is in it, it can be customizable, even the language in a few minutes. Any local teacher can just share even native languages. I actually developed this technology to function in indigenous regions in my country. So the local teachers can switch from Spanish to the local language. And then in the global context, the local teachers can switch between English and the native language. We are improving to AI so that they can switch it more easily and faster to any language across the world. We really are gathering many local teachers across the world that are improving our technology so that it can be customizable to local language because that's what's really important for me. And then it works offline already. But since we are training local teachers, we are doing sort of a bootcamp for those moments that the teachers are being trained. Those are the moments that we are using the hotspots just to train the teachers so that they can use the technology. The training actually lasts around one hour per school. So it's going to be just a short training so that the cost of hotspots and internet connection for them is going to be really low. And we have already set the cost with the foundation that is receiving this technology and is partnering with us in Nigeria. Also the devices. Our technology works in low-cost devices. It was really also important for us because many of the youth that we are working, they already have a smartphone. Actually more than 60% of the population across the global south have already smartphone. Mainly young people. And they use it for Facebook or just fossil networks. But our app works in low-cost devices. So with the partner organization that we are doing this project, they have already set the number of students that are going to be using and the number of students that have already devices. So they can use our platform without internet connection. Just don't load in the app and then they can access to all the resources without any problem, wherever they are. And then for the business model, we have been getting many, like we partner with companies. We have been working only in Colombia, but in Paraguay, Philippines, Pakistan already. And then what we have done is that we partner with companies that have social responsibility projects. Our platforms are not only to provide projects and content, but it also allows the company to track the progress of each user so that they can download impact reports that can then they can show how they are impacting those kind of communities. And then also we partner with companies that have job opportunities for young people in those regions so that they can create content based on job opportunities. And then the young people can be trained through our lab and then access to those opportunities. And they pay for that. And we have been sustainable already in Latin America. And then we paid projects in Philippines and Pakistan. And then there are some sponsors that are looking to expand their projects, such as DHL, many companies that are reaching out to those communities and they need young people that don't, they don't necessarily have to be highly trained, but they just need to access to some content and they can do so through our lab. And then the content that is in our lab, we train local teachers to create their own content based in their own curricula. We don't provide content created by ourselves. And then we also partner with universities in the local context, like in universities in Nigeria, we partner with some universities there so that the students can also access to some complementary education, vocational courses, and just training courses that allow them to just get a certificate and access to job opportunities. So the content, the language and the context is all customizable through our platform. So any local teacher can just customize it as they like. They can change the avatar to look like them, to speak like them, and also just to have content that is related to the community. So everything can be personalized. We really want to empower young people and the local teachers so that always the app can keep customized, customized and personalized for each community that we are arriving. And that's something that we really wanted to focus. We didn't want to create a genetic tool. We really want to create a personalized solution at a global scale. I think those are my answers. But we have been getting so many also awards that we allowed us to keep growing and to just empower more organizations to work in partnership. It's also helped us to lower costs. And then we have designers and developers all across the global south. We are a remote team, young people that they want to do something for their own community. We also have an internship program where young people across the world can just access to internship with us and lead a project in their own community. So we empower them with the tools, the resources and the knowledge that they have to know. And we train them through our lab as well to lead projects in their community. So that way we are lowering our costs and also getting employees that are related to the content so we can keep everything really personalized. And that's the way that we are growing. Thank you very much, Tanya. That was a fascinating story. And it's great to hear that you're already sustainable. So you made it. That's great. If there are no more clarification points from the jury, we can now move on to the next innovator. Thank you, Tanya. Paul, move on to Ecuador and USA with Ms. Soledad Mills with the digital literacy in Ecuador's Amazon. Do we have Soledad with us? Hi, everyone. Yes, I'm here. Let me just pull up the presentation here. Please. Let me know when you can. We can see it. Okay. Wonderful. Thank you for having us here today. My name is Soledad Mills. I'm the CEO of Equitable Origin and I'm going to talk about our initiative to provide internet connectivity and access in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest. The vast majority of the more than one million indigenous peoples in Ecuador are not able to access the internet and very few communities have computer centers, many of which have fallen into disuse as they're not online. And for indigenous peoples, the need to access information is critical, especially in the context of a global pandemic and mechanisms to share cultural, environmental and traditional knowledge and learning promotes education, health and economic opportunities and allows indigenous peoples to assert their human rights. Our solution provides internet access to schools, computer centers and hotspots and remote indigenous communities. We'll start with the Nankais indigenous community on the border of Ecuador and Peru. I'm building on over a decade of working with indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Our initiative will bridge the digital divide that exists between indigenous peoples and the rest of society, enabling them to access information tools that can help to build resilience in their communities and fully exercise their human rights. Our solution is innovative from a social impact standpoint as it's the only project focusing on digital inclusion for indigenous peoples in the Amazon region, which is a challenging area to provide this technology. Our strategy also includes providing ongoing support and capacity building for communities on digital literacy communications and human rights. The technology we're using involves a broadband connection that will come from a nearby cell tower. The national telecom company CNT will act as the internet service provider lowering the overall data cost. We'll work with our indigenous partner organizations to identify and train local community members to support the project on an ongoing basis. We expect that this project can provide a scalable model that we can replicate across the Amazon region and we're actively seeking funding from multiple sources including matching funds from existing and former donors. Our metrics for success include the ability to access the internet and how that access is used. Financial success will be achieved when the project becomes fully sustainable and the communities are able to pay for the ongoing service costs. We have several proofs of concept and examples where this exact solution has fit the problem and users have been satisfied with the outcome. Our partner organization in Venio has worked to connect over 100 rural healthcare centers to the internet in Liberia and Sierra Leone and they've also connected schools, hospitals, clinics and government offices in five Liberian counties. We've piloted our digital inclusion strategy in Mexico where we've provided internet connection to a remote indigenous community that has enabled 100 people to gain access to the internet and 40 children and youth to continue their education during the pandemic. We'll use this funding to survey the community's geography and infrastructure and begin working with local community members or comunicadores in collaboration with our indigenous organizational partners on the ground. Our project promotes self-south and triangular cooperation by creating public-private partnerships and facilitating indigenous-led content development, education and knowledge sharing around technology, communications and strategies for realizing the right to health, education and a healthy environment. This project also leverages our technology partnership with in Venio and their learnings from implementing similar projects in remote and rural communities all over the world. Thank you. Thank you very much Saladan. That was another great pitch. I'm turning over the floor to the jury and I have Victoria for some of my lists. Victoria please for a question. Hi, congrats on what you built. I just want to know what is the stage of a technology? Have you been deployed that already or you are going to deploy that and what is the amount that is needed to start a project to be commercialized? Thank you Victoria. I'm moving to Sylvia for a question. We will again take all questions first and then let Soledad respond to the bunch of questions. Sylvia the floor is yours. Thank you very much Soledad and it's good to see I'm from Costa Rica and so it's good to see already three proposals from Latin America. Soledad I have two questions because when we talk about digital inclusion it's not only about the access but also what about digital skills and what about having also the devices that are needed. Have you taken that into consideration? That's my first question and then you mentioned very briefly that you want to the objective is that at some point this becomes sustainable and that the Indigenous communities will be able to pay for their own services. How do you plan to do that? Back to you. Thank you Sylvia, Rajat over to you for your question. Thanks very much Soledad congratulations. This is a fantastic project and I've worked on stuff like this earlier so I'm really curious to know. So with regards to the components that you're using what's the kind of range that we're talking about in a line of sight? That's number one. Number two is who owns the connection because I'm sure that even the ISP would require somebody's name to be on the bill and I think building from Sylvia's point about ownership of devices you mentioned that there's a certain percentage is fairly low number right at the start of your presentation about community ownership, community access to devices. What's the percentage of individual access? Thanks very much. Thank you Rajat. Those are points that we really need to clarify. Sameh. Thank you. Great work in fact. Just I'm a bit confused about the scope of your work because I think I read in the submission form that you're also working on developing e-content. If this is the case I think e-content and the connectivity solution requires two sets of skills. So how you are dealing with such kind of challenge to grow. Thank you. Thank you very much and Gayan over to you for your question or did we just do the same. I'll make my question quick. Thank you for that presentation. What is the rough cost for a community for the devices that you're talking about? Thank you for this question and Jonathan you're the last one on my list. My question is a follow on from Rajat's question. If the solution is a point-to-point situation can you elaborate on the environmental impacts on the installation of your technology? Thank you. Thank you very much indeed another important question. So Saladat the floor is yours now to respond to all questions from the jurors. Thank you. Yes that's a lot of questions in a short amount of time so I'll try and go very quickly. So the stage of the technology is fully proven as I mentioned in Benio has implemented this technology solution in dozens of communities all over the world. The solution involves using excess capacity of the cell tower to provide a lower cost internet connection. We've also used satellite internet connection in Mexico but have found that that's more expensive. So the challenge with this technology is that it relies on the partnership with the telecommunications company so that's a key component. So it is a proven technology. The cost to start a project is relatively low because the actual technology piece doesn't cost that much the surveying. We have to survey the community as I mentioned to ensure the correct installation. So we can start a project for as little as as 20 to $25,000. In the case of Mexico we actually had the the installation fees waived by the company so it depends on the project partner as well but because part of our digital inclusion strategy includes providing that ongoing capacity building and development of content we are seeking funds for up to $100,000 to work in multiple communities in Ecuador over a number of years. In terms of digital skills and devices the digital skills aspect is certainly a gap that we're seeking to close with this project. In Mexico we worked with our Indigenous partner organization to develop a guide a digital literacy guide and we conducted digital literacy workshops in the computer center as well as virtually. There is a relatively high amount of smartphone penetration it's just not always able to be connected so the devices are not as much of an issue as the actual connection. In terms of the sustainability of costs the model of empowering the community members to be able to sell the service to their neighbors has enabled us to move towards sustainability in the case of the Mexico project and after approximately 12 months we're at about 40% sustainability where the local communicadora is able to sell approximately $30 a month to neighbors and other people using the service so if we can get also the government involved to purchase that amount to provide connection to the computer center then that will be closer to 70% sustainability. And in terms of the the line of sight the distance between the cell tower and the community is approximately 40 to 50 kilometers and the in terms of the ownership it would be that the ownership would go to the local Indigenous organization and the the leader of that organization would be the the name on on that on that contract and in terms of developing e-content we actually have a whole online resource hub and online university that is created by and for Indigenous people so we've we've worked with Indigenous peoples to provide the the actual e-learning content we've developed three month long e-learning courses through a joint platform so we were that this is a little bit outside of this particular grant but we do we are doing all of the the e-content development as well and we have a team of about five people working on that and supporting our local Indigenous comunicadores to create that content and share it online and then in terms of the cost it really varies from community to community in the case of Mexico we also had to put in solar panels at a cost of about two thousand dollars because the the electricity was too intermittent to enable the connectivity to be sustainable to the community computer center but that was that's a one-off cost that can then benefit the community over the long run and create more sustainable access did I miss any questions I believe we've covered it also that that was very concrete and to the point I would still ask the the jury if they have any clarification points the last one I see Victoria and Jonathan's hands but they're all hands thank you very much indeed and that was very well timed as well so thank you very much very well done and thank you for pitching us up on this great project we will now move to a different region and see how innovators in other regions are suggesting to find solutions Egypt and Ms. Hydeer Barbar with the digital storytelling video but dear are you there yes welcome the floor is yours yeah I'm sharing my screen please confirm when it is shared we see it okay great I'm Hydeer Barbar from Yomami e-learning solutions an organization based in Egypt and today we have the digital storytelling videos project and this project has started with the beginning with the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 and we have been exploring the impact of COVID-19 particularly the socio-economic impact and also the problem started and completed with reports based on the numbers retrieved from AUN-DV report on the socio-economic impact assessment and I'm giving here two examples about the poverty and the gender equality and now we are expecting that 40 to 60 million people will be pushed into severe poverty because of the economic burden because of COVID-19 and also the gender equality particularly at the healthcare system level and healthcare provisions are highly impacted and then we have also identified a particular problem related to this impact and this is about the lack of structure the communication and channels between the impacted people and the duty bearer represented in the policy makers and decision makers and also there is a huge shift from the COVID-19 from the development to focus to the COVID-19 treatment and vaccination which left a lot of people behind and now we have an urge to establish South to South's partnership because of the need to share experience and share successful experiences and now Yomami e-learning solution is providing digital storytelling videos and interactively learning courses and also to help healthcare workers and community members affected by COVID-19 to voice their challenges and design responses to policy makers and decision maker on the national levels and also through sharing successful experiences and through our business model we are trying to make it more sustainable and scalable starting from the COVID-19 till now through Yomami a different digital solution and we aim at creating sustainable relationship between the community member and the policy maker to enhance and improve the situation about the impact of COVID-19 in their social and economic status and about our value we create and capture and deliver and we create here like a powerful community that have all the tools to speak for themselves and then we offer them a safe digital platform to voice their challenges and the structure a very well called for action messages and we deliver this through different advocacy events particularly online events and also through social media campaigns and here we have some different key metrics either operational financial or related to the digital marketing related to the quality of work the importance of value and also the return on advertising spend and time period and total revenue and here's some examples of what we have been providing to the communities through our work and we have provided two policy papers developed and two fact sheets and five digital storytelling meetings including nine participation from Egypt and Kenya and they have been delivered through different national and international events and through different the platform we have previously received the two grants from women deliver organization that is based in the US and during the international based in the Netherlands and we have different participants took initiative on the community level and health care provision level to design sustainable action in the form of policy recommendation and policy actions and also we have a huge collaboration between Kenya Bangladesh Nigeria on distinguishing on digitization of advocacy effort and here how we could spend the like the grant that we are hopefully to receive this is usually what we do with most of our grants but of course it is it depends on the adjustment and requirement and condition and requirement by the funder we spend the mostly 60 percent on the production of interactive e-learning materials and digital storytelling videos that work both online and offline and through this we ensure that they are also accessible to people who have limited accessibility on the to the internet particularly in the slum areas like very poor area that are challenging with severe poverty and finally we have our team here great you made you made it right on time that was that was very comprehensive comprehensive and exciting indeed yeah thank you and we already have hands from the jury I will start with aren't okay thank you very much for your presentation I'd like to find out what has changed for your company with COVID what you're describing as a project that uses digital to do storytelling yes has COVID brought any significant change to your business model to the technology that you can use because there has been more adaptation adoption sorry or are you innovating in any other way due to COVID thank you thank you aren't we will again take all the questions from the jury and then we will let Hadeer respond to all of them at once Fumza over to you for your question thank you very much Julia Hadeer I loved it and I love the energy with which you present this with passion I see it as an answer to many issues around rural community connectivity I just am not seeing the monetization outside of the advertising what is the monetization plan that you have around this and the second question is what is in it for the community because you are creating content out of their life stories but what are they getting out of it and I think it could be something that is linked to the first question around the monetization thank you very much thank you very much Fumza Rajad so well aren't preempted me on my question over there but I want to build on what Fumza just said about what's the community getting out of it it's it rings very similar to projects where the community creates material and then passes them along do you act as a conduit for this material to let's say individuals who can then be deployed within the community to affect behavioral change that's a question that's of particular importance to me I have one more but I'm still sort of framing it I'll come back in a little bit thanks very much of course of course thank you Rajad Sami over to you thank you very good presentation for a good solution I have two questions it's along the line of the other questions give us just one or two examples of stories that were already here because you are telling you are helping people to tell the story so give us just one or two examples of stories that were actually here during the last period and also why you opted to have your own platform instead of having something working on the social existing social media platforms something that that will be more accessible and more popular for the people you have better if you work on on something already existing you will have a better chance for the story to be here back to you thank you very much Sami and Victoria your question please Adir very very interested in what you are doing I think it's a beautiful way of conveying the culture in such a region I want to know about your content because producing a content it has a cost and in the beginning perhaps you can leverage the passion of the you know community around it to build a story and digitize it but what is the content you know producing in a long run are you going to hire people are you giving part of your you know revenue and you know act like a give a commission to people that they produce a content so if you can explain more in regards to that would be great thank you very much Victoria and Adir the floor is now yours for those five questions yeah thank you again for all your amazing question I will start with the situation of COVID-19 and how it impacted our organization mostly there was a shift from holding all the workshop physical physically like face-to-face to the beneficiaries about like to how to train them on on developing a story and how to structure a call for message action and we have switched everything to virtual and this required us a lot of spend money spending on structuring and offering people internet bundle particularly it is a relatively expensive in the countries that we have been working with and also have been expensive for the beneficiaries so we had to spend the more money on it but yet we have turned it most of all the challenges into opportunities and this is we have figured out more digital solutions offering more interactive e-learning particularly the offline ones and to talk about some examples from these stories and what is in for the community and what is in for the healthcare workers about telling their stories actually we we work on building their capacity building on calling for their own rights within their institution if they are working within healthcare institution or on the community level they understand and they get familiar with the policy making process and who is in charge of their county for instance or city or region and how they approach them to ask for their needs and also we encourage active citizenship so we have been working on two things like giving them like empowering them and the second one we stimulated active citizenship and they contributed to the changing policy and also some of the beneficiary contributed to writing these policy papers and policy notes and recommendation that was delivered to the national level so they started to speak for themselves instead of having a meteor or someone speak on their behalf and giving some examples about it we have been working on the affected health practices by the healthcare workers one of them was a public health officer working in Michakos County in Kenya and she was going to her work like in the field work on a 30 minutes on a motorbike that affected her menstruation her physical ability and also it affected her money spending particularly in the COVID-19 time prices are increased and what we could see through telling her story we have been screening this story in different international event and we have pushed for a policy action that shaped their experience within their work and we have some policy action from the national level of the healthcare provision they offered them different like cars instead of motorbike to go to the field work and this is how they are contributing to changing the policy some other experiences was from adolescent girls after taking the consent from their families talking about how poverty and severe gender inequality affected their experiences after COVID-19 like the gender inequality the lack of safety walking in the street being subjected to sexual harassment and also how the financial situation of the whole family affected responding to their healthcare needs and about yeah and also we have been talking about why we are actually we are using different social media platform and we are not creating a new platform these digital story telling are usually shared on the different websites of the partners and the social media platform so we are creating a tool that can be shareable on any platform not especially the support from and use actually the audience capacity of each social media platform and that we have from each partner and we also have potential partners other than Egypt and Kenya in Bangladesh and Nigeria based on the approval of taking this grant or not who are excited about joining this grant I hope I covered the most of the questions as far as I remember please yeah maybe on to Victoria's question around how exactly you imagine the business model and hiring people kind of paying commissions and really the little bit on the details yeah actually you may have all the capacity and all the employees who have the technical capacity to create like we have the studios to record the voice and we have all the especially Amira she's maybe on the screen she is a digital innovation specialist and also Brahim they are very active in managing all the the creation process of these digital innovation tool and all the team members and also extra employees within UMAMI are volunteering to carry out all the activities so we are not going to hire external consultancy or external companies to participate because UMAMI has all the capacity the human resources to carry out the activity of the project thank you very much Victoria did you want to add something to that or is it an old hand uh no thank you very much and thank you very much we have from with a follow-up question please just one question for me who are the funders currently on this solution who's helping you with funding yeah actually we have now of LATON it is based in the Netherlands and they have been funding us for the past nine months and now like like last week we have granted a new fund for two years for the upcoming two years so it will be a joint project between the two funds and also we have external partners about they are working on different products but for this one particularly it is called of LATON International and it is based in the Netherlands thanks to them thank you very much for the year that's a very very topical and inspiring project indeed and very well done to you on scoping it and getting it as far as you've already taken it thank you very much indeed here and with this we now move to the next project and to the next speech and we're going to Ghana with Heather Beam blended hands-on science teacher training do we have Heather with us yes I'm here welcome Heather and the floor is yours when you're ready to share your screen thanks hello everyone my name is Heather Beam I'm the CEO and founder of practical education network I'm excited to tell you the low-cost pandemic resistant approach we are taking to equip STEM teachers in Ghana we've designed our content with locally available materials and we've designed the content with global impact in mind here in Ghana more than 90 percent of the public schools don't contain even a single piece of laboratory equipment furthermore more than 95 percent of the STEM teachers haven't attended relevant training to deal with this very present challenge as a result the students in their classes lose interest they disengage because all they're doing in school is memorizing whatever the teacher writes on the blackboard the next Katika Riko who is the pioneer of the mRNA vaccine could be one of the hundreds of millions of children on the African continent but her STEM teacher lacks the materials and the training to unleash her innate potential practical education network is building the STEM skills of African children we're doing this by leveraging an online training we developed during the COVID-19 pandemic our training is for STEM teachers in Ghana and across the global south in the training we use a combination of prerecorded videos like the one you see a screenshot of here and live sessions on zoom to equip teachers with ideas for how they can use low-cost locally available materials to deploy engaging experiential hands-on activities with their students our model is a cascade model Penn partners with a number of organizations universities such as MIT which i'm an alum of industry partners such as Exxon Mobile who cares about the STEM pipeline and government here in Ghana we've worked closely with the ministry of education Ghana in partnership with those organizations we organize trainings for teachers we do this online we gather dozens of teachers together on zoom like you see on the screen we engage them we give them instructions on how they gather materials that they can find in their own respective locations simple things like straws and sticks and stones and water bottles and flowers online they learn how to do activities with those materials they practice them themselves then we discuss what they've done on zoom the teachers that make it all the way through the training program get certified to become trainers in hands-on STEM and then they organize trainings for their peer colleagues and most of them can do this in person with about 10 teachers close to them so through this cascade model Penn can directly impact thousands of students at once over the last five years we've been doing this work in Ghana in that time we've trained about 100 trainers locally here in hands-on science together we have reached more than 3500 teachers and they have impacted more than half a million students many of whom are doing hands-on learning for the first time in school additionally the government has seen the imports of this approach and they actually invited us to join them on the science panel as they revised the national curriculum they invited us and we were able to infuse hands-on content with locally available materials into Ghana's new national science curriculum we've also done a couple of research studies one of which showed that teachers who receive this type of training make a significant impact on their student's learning students going through this program can get up to 97 percent greater increase in their exam scores compared to their counterparts in schools doing rote memorization business as usual through this program we would pilot our hands-on STEM teacher training which is available online with the Solomon Islands some representatives from the ministry of education the Solomon Islands actually contacted us expressing interest in how they too could learn to develop a grassroots network of teachers who are using locally available materials to to spread STEM this is the team that I lead they're eight full-time local staff the management team has a combined experience of over 20 years of management in nonprofits and combines more than 10 years of teaching experience in STEM fields so we're eager to work together with this program and spread locally available materials which are available at a low cost to enable STEM experiences to happen across the global south thanks thank you very much Heather and that was absolutely fascinating I already see three hands from the jury and I will start with arms please for your question thank you Heather this is really very interesting I was wondering what you define as the digital part of your innovation other than the conference calls you would have with the teachers what dry what's the digital driver of your solution thank you aren't Sylvia thank you I'm I want to better understand this I understood the trickle down effect but I want to better understand what is the ultimate objective do you want this the for example you stated from 200 to 3500 into 600 000 students it is for students to then go into STEM careers and to STEM studies what is the age group of these students because this is not it was not very clear what the content of this by being trained and then train the trainers but then what is the content that is being encouraged so and is being linked to STEM so that ultimately is it to have more young people going into STEM studies and STEM careers thank you Sylvia Jonathan Heather the new trend in education is moving from STEM to STEAM can you enlighten us as to why you are not going in with that momentum thank you thank you Jonathan Sami great work and very important work for the african countries two questions if you can elaborate more on your sustainability plan okay and also the south south cooperation aspects in your project thank you very much for this question and Fumza you're at the last thank you very much Lulia and well done Heather this is really important work for the continent and also just how simplistic you're making the education to be just one question for me normally with these the challenge becomes the payment for the data part and the connectivity you know for the various schools that the teachers are in who is bearing that cost at this model and also for schools that do not have connectivity what do you do the second part of that is also how do what is the retention rate of the teachers are you able to retain them through the entire process and curriculum thank you Fumza and Heather the floor is yours to address all those questions right thank you for the questions the digital part of our innovation in addition to the live sessions on zoom we have modularized our hands-on activities into short videos these videos are instructional guides for teachers on how they can do one particular activity in for STEM using locally available materials so the training is a combination of teachers watching these prerecorded videos doing the physical activities themselves uploading the videos onto an LMS and then our trainer reviews and we discuss on on zoom and have some additional discussions on the LMS and it's important to note that we've actually designed these prerecorded videos with scale in mind so the way that we have filmed the videos it's it's sort of like a cooking style video you see somebody with their hand just the hands of somebody mixing certain ingredients together so the idea is that we'll simply be able to create new audio tracks whether that's for a different language or a different accent because you know the Ghanaian English accent is quite different from the Liberian English accent for example but it'll be straightforward for us to create new audio tracks and overlay those onto our existing content so we're looking forward to leveraging that to be able to scale this digital content the ultimate objective it's multifaceted but I think one key way to capture it is developing countries in the global south need technical workforces in order to sustainably develop there are significant infrastructure challenges that can be tackled with a vibrant technical workforce if young people have the critical thinking and problem solving skills and technical skills they can build the roads and the power and the water and sanitation infrastructure that these countries rely on in order to develop and add on innovations on top of so our program seeks to address that challenge at the foundation we necessarily in order to build a technical workforce you necessarily must equip students from the earliest age with those opportunities so we have three objectives for what students get out of the program one is that their learning outcomes will increase so we should see an improvement in their understanding of concepts which we can capture through their exam scores we want to see their interest in science increase a lot of students are afraid of science and math and so they drop out because they don't see themselves pursuing it so we want to see increase in exam scores increase in attitudes interest in science and STEM and then finally their critical thinking skills even if a student doesn't end up going into science in the future if they have that foundation of critical thinking they are equipped to do to be a force for good in the development of their countries steam indeed a lot of people are talking about steam these days I think we've we've stuck with STEM you know in the in to to avoid maybe necessarily hopping on to every new fad that might come up but I would say that we do have an element of art to an extent in our program in that we have design specifically as part of what we're also equipping teachers to do so in addition to learning how to replicate pre you know pre-constructed science and mathematics activities we also do some design activities with them so they're also building their ability to think creatively and create new learning solutions sustainability so sustainability is I would say quite inherent in the model that we have for a couple of reasons one is the cascade approach right so we're building capacity of people who are already teachers there and they themselves are going to continue to live on with those skills and be able to spread out the impact to their colleagues we're also working within the system we didn't choose to do an after school program we're choosing to work within the system providing training for teachers who are in classrooms right now and are the people on the front lines impacting student learning and to give you an example so one of the trainers that came through our program is actually now one of the national science coordinators in the country and so that inherently is a you know a sustainable piece of our of our approach that's going to live on far beyond you know the specific training that we offered he's there moving around the country advocating and championing hands-on approaches the south-south cooperation aspects so I mentioned the Solomon Islands we've actually had about five countries in addition to the Solomon Islands reach out to us expressing their interest you know saying that we have the same challenge in our country students are not learning science and math they're fearful of it but we need them to pursue those subjects so what would it take for you to also come to our country and do this so there's actually quite a bit of demand and we're looking to pilot who would use this funding for us to do a pilot so we would first make a trip to that country two of our staff to build relationships with key stakeholders there replicating the way we've done it here in Ghana which is to be in close partnership with the Ministry of Education and other relevant organizations such as the science teachers association then run the first stage of our training in person while we're there then continue our training online using the modules that we've already developed and we anticipate the the key piece of this is really building those relationships with with people on the ground as for modifying our content to be relevant in other countries there will be an element of that but science topics are really pretty similar across the world when you teach kids science I think as they're growing up pretty similar topics we're we're covering with them all right I think the last question was on connectivity so we have run this online training in Ghana now for more than 200 teachers across more than 10 different districts in the country and we have actually done that with some rural teachers as well so despite the internet challenges we've been able to keep the video short enough that teachers are able to access them even if they have to wait until let's say late at night when the connection's a bit better so we've we found ways of of overcoming some of those infrastructure challenges thank you very much header we're technically out of time but I see that Jonathan and Victoria have their hands up for a quick follow-up Jonathan sorry that's a legacy hand okay that's that saves a bit of time Victoria anything to add no I think she provided all the information thank you thank you very much and Virjad really quickly Heather thanks very much so you've talked about the cost of each of the of the materials for each activity being roughly less than two dollars so let's round it up to two dollars and how many activities do you have in total and consequently what's the cost of let's say a sixth grade you know materials right all the all of that and who sort of provides the the the who supports that cost yeah thanks okay yes so indeed our activities are low costs two dollars is usually the maximum that it would cost a lot of these materials you can find for free that two dollars doesn't we can't exactly multiply it times the number of activities because teachers will end up using the same materials for other other things but we usually cover about 10 between 15 or 15 to 20 activities with teachers across the entirety of the training program it costs about two thousand dollars to bring a trainer all the way through the series of stages that we have in our training and as I said through the cascade the trainer is reaching about a thousand students each because they are working with at least 10 peers and each peer is reaching you know about a hundred students or so thank you very much Heather is that it just in terms of who's paying for it's a combination of foundations corporations universities that are supporting the cost at the moment thank you very much that that clarifies indeed on a last note if I may I really can't relate to the comment that Roger made earlier around the digital component and strengthening that component probably also with stakeholders from the digital field you had the ministry of education as part of your partnership network the ministry of digital ICTs or communications might be a good partner to also join that that initiative I'm saying that because in my experience in Kenya that there there have been some very interesting synergies between those ministries and they're not necessarily used to work together but through initiatives like yours they might actually see the benefit and for the much broader benefit of communities as well so that's just on a very final note thank you very much indeed great project and thank you very much for for for being with us thank you we're now ready to move to the next innovator from India Mr Pratip Chakrabortri building digital tools to strengthen India's COVID-19 response through nutrition application thank you Julia the floor is yours Pratip thank you so much Julia let me share my screen so can you confirm that you can see my screen yes we can thank you so much so good evening good afternoon good morning in whichever part of the world you are my name is Pratip Chakrabortri I work with DiMagi as the director for partnerships and I'm very happy to present to you DiMagi's nutrition solution the nutrition problem in the world as of course India and various other LMICs it's a humongous problem I have given some big numbers to deal with but the systemic issues that we all in LMICs as well as in India are facing are the community health worker focus on record keeping instead of service delivery health systems have unreliable indicators there's poor supervision mechanism and limited and delayed data insights and this has led to several problems in the wake of COVID-19 our nutrition propositions value statement is as follows DiMagi is developing a nutrition focused app to help government beneficiaries and community health workers to nutrition to do nutrition service delivery and health and nutrition tracking at scale with customizable modules and adaptable frontline tools our business model is pretty simple our market are basically government as well as health administrators who track key indicators and plan health and nutrition programming as well as philanthropies and corporate CSR who can quickly mobilize frontline worker cadres our nutrition solutions has to have a base within either a country at a national level a state region or district or a village or at a community health center level our business model is sustainable it covers critical life stages right from 0 to 6 year old children to pregnant and lactating mothers adolescent boys and girls it has offline capability to ensure that it can be still used in internet dark areas it has on the go reporting so that real time reports and dashboards about nutrition data can be generated it has high functional coverage customizing customizable capabilities it's multilingual can be translated into in any unicode compliant language auto-generated growth graphs as per WHO standards and multimedia capability to ensure that this application acts as a job aid tool for frontline intervening frontline workers it's it's extremely scalable it is built using a platform that has been proven to work at scale there are so many evidences about com care solutions being used as a data collection platform and if you have the presentation you should be able to go to some of the documents as well as some of the partner blogs that DiMagi has written in terms of revenue models we're already striving for additional funding from national as well as state governments we have we are in advanced state of discussions with the Maharashtra government of India and of course some corporates who implement large-scale pro and nutrition programs through CSR in terms of metrics the number of projects utilizing the net nutrition solution number of mobile users number of SAM and MAM children tracked as well as corrective actions taken would be some of the metrics in terms of problem solution fit the nutrition solution is being used in a host of COVID related projects as well as some of the noted projects are in Mozambique some in India and of course the largest com care was subject to one of the largest mHealth programs in India which was done by the Ministry of Women and Child Development you can actually see a video which has been linked in the presentation USAID's advancing nutrition project released a comprehensive report on the use of digital tools and among those digital tools that you see in the right hand side table com care was used in 16 of the reports reviewed projects in terms of plan for seed funding of course we will use any seed funding that comes by us for any LMIC to build out a frontline worker application as well as a supervisor application and for global south-south collaboration we will leverage FLW and community health worker strengths because we know that CHW community health worker forms or have the same problems in LMICs will customize the solution according to the needs and requirements of the countries and track health and nutrition issues that have arisen due to the COVID-19 pandemic some of the team members are here the team members are a mix of project managers public health specialists as well as technical project managers I thank you for listening to the presentation and I'm open for questions thank you very much Preeti for this very well timed and very informative presentation before we move to the questions of the jury I would like to remind all the people who are following this event on swap cards to use the hashtags that we're promoting here rediscover innovation and south-south cooperation over your preferred channel on social media rediscover innovation and south-south cooperation please use these tags when you're when you're talking about the event on social media and we can now move to the jury and their questions Victoria over to you congratulations on what you built it's a amazing way of educating people to nutrition especially in the developing countries that the obesity is so high and the dynamic is changing to take care of themselves I want to know your business model and monetization at the moment you are working with the government so your focus is more like using and leveraging the government to give a verness however in a later stage what is the strategy of you to become a proper you know technology to make money and you know kind of take it to the public are you thinking on a B2B model or are you thinking on a both B2B and B2C thank you Victoria, Rajat? Yeah thanks very much Pratip it was a fantastic presentation thanks very much of course I've heard of DiMagi living in India myself I have a question with regards to what you're intending to do with the seed funding you said that you're planning to build these frontline worker and the and the coordinator applications now in many places in India and across LMICs in general you have villages and areas that have issues with last mile connectivity particularly to internet access so how do you envision these apps sort of adapting to periods and occasions of reduced or in some cases absolutely no internet connectivity thanks very much thank you very much Rajat over to you Sylvia thank you very much and again yes also super interesting too we're jumping from one part of the world to the two others and yeah my question is more and I went also a bit through your website and I wanted to understand if this app is already running and if you have some numbers how if you've been able to measure some of the results because ultimately you're talking about nutrition you showed us some numbers of the terrible numbers that are at the very beginning of your presentation but it would be good to know for for the relevance and also the the viability of this this project is is it already running how many people have used it and what results has it shown thank you thank you Sylvia and the last question from this round is from Sami over to you thank you of course my nutrition is a real problem in in many developing countries I would I would like to understand more who is your client you know are are you helping the government to collect a macro level data about the nutrition issue in in in a region and based on that they can come up with a new better policy or are you or your client is the family okay so that you the the app would help a family to get specialized or personalized advice on on a specific malnutrition case if if your client is a is a government that the government is has the authority to ask people to provide data about their weight nutrition issues and all of that if if if if you're asking the people to provide data about themselves okay how can you guarantee that they will provide the data back to you thank you Sami Rajat would you like to add something yes so malnutrition is of course an issue that transcends COVID-19 I just wanted to ask how does your solution right now address the issues that and the challenges that are faced that we face because of COVID-19 thanks thank you very much indeed an important question and Pradeep over to you to answer all the questions and you have almost seven minutes the floor is yours thank you thank you I'll be answering the questions one by one to Victoria's question with respect to how do we intend to make money so that that money comes from B2B relationships with a host of organizations that we are talking with and that includes state as well as provincial as well as national governments now a part of the money and and to have this com care subscription we need a managed cloud hosting so a part of the money is also trying to host this whole application into the server and the market provides the necessary services in terms of business model it is basically a funded a funded model so you will have to you will have to rely on project funding and especially for governments who want to have large robust scalable programs on data quality as well as involving health and nutrition data tracking so it's it's the revenue will come from governments the revenue will come from corporate corporate social responsibility with companies who who can mobilize frontline workers faster so there are there are two sources of revenue and we are also in the process of cracking some of these sources and I'll give you some examples later on in terms of last mile connectivity so com care already has the record of working offline because it was built for resource poor environments in India and of course LMICs have large internet dark areas so you just have to update and this update can take take place over a week so but then com care works offline it just your mobile just uh you you enter your data in your mobile and if your mobile is not connected to the internet the data is stored in the in the mobile if your mobile is connected to the internet and you get time and the bandwidth to connect it takes around 10 to 15 seconds to update the data and the data goes directly from the mobile to the com care server so so it has com care is known for having offline connectivity so that's one in terms of malnutrition yes so so this is this is basically a data sharing solution so during covid demagi came out with a lot of these template applications which were used for port of entry tracking as well as other areas for for patient tracking and one of these examples was in Delhi where during the first wave of when the covid struck India this com care was used for for doing patient management as well as trying to get the number of beds in each hospital so in in the earlier covid phase we we had this deli government publishing regular real-time figures on the number of beds and patients that are available for each hospital each government hospital and it was actually based on com care data now the data has been transferred to the deli government so so in terms of sylvia's question um so is com care already running so yes com care is a data application platform so versions of com care are running around in 130 countries of the world is this nutrition solution running so the this is a modular application and this modular application is built with different experiences as well as different modules on malnutrition over nutrition all kinds of modules are there in the in this in this in this application so this nutrition application is running in the state of tamil nadu know where we have gained around a hundred thousand dollars from the from the smith futures organization to run com care solution with 3000 workers with around three million people for doing patient tracking as well as nutrition tracking of people in tamil nadu so a version of com care with its tamil nadu's own needs and requirements is already running but as part of the global south south cooperation we only mean that wherever there has been decrease of socioeconomic conditions because of covid as well as decrease and a dip in health and nutrition indicators of children and adults i think this uh this solution can come in extremely handy with regard to samay's question who is your client our client is basically the government it is basically a frontline worker or a community health worker application tool com care is not meant for the the beneficiaries with regard to whether people would be giving data so of course we follow all indian laws so any data that is collected from indians remains in india and we have very strict data protection laws we are sought to uh compliant and then we're also trying to be compliant with the national digital health blueprint h n d h b under the national digital health mission but with regard to um uh compliances uh data compliances in other countries we will follow we are very strict monitoring as well as data privacy standards and we will follow uh follow them thank you very much for the um um i think we we've covered it all um sylvia would you like to make a follow-up um on what redid just said uh no thank you i think my hand is still raised thank you very much okay so we're all good thank you very much for deep that was uh very comprehensive very insightful as well um thank you for being here um and um we will now move to the next um innovator who's also from india and i'm calling upon miss subhi kuraishi who will present packs patient centric active adherence care and treatment solution packs hello hi yeah this is subhi just a connection this is mr subhi not miss because i didn't read the name no no no the name is pretty feminine so it is it always creates a lot of confusion about who is going to come and talk so this is subhi from india uh i'll just put on my presentation please so i hope it is visible now we can we saw something and then it's gone now if we can come in again uh sorry i need to share also we can now see so hello hi i'm subhi from zmq are you going to see this finna here everyone yes we're good yeah so the solution that i'm talking about is called packs it's patient active care and treatment solution for tv patients and we know tv is one of the oldest pandemics running in the developing world it was in the north so it is in the south right or rampant in almost 40 countries where we are high burden tv countries of the world and my solution obviously we are doing it globally also but we are in the prison solutions and talking about the pack is from india where in india we have 2.64 million cases that were reported in 2019 of which 210 000 patients died of tv and there if you go to africa there is higher number of deaths due to a co-infection of tv along with hib aids and during the covid period the infection notification dropped almost 60 percent and people did not report any kind of tv or neither the system came and approached the uh communities for reporting tv so it was limited access to health uh uh community free and accessing health system during the covid and there were 17 percent dropout uh patients who were on treatment so we came up with a model called pack which is a bottom of you see we have a technology for development company and we design bottom of design models which are driven by the community so we came up with this pack which is driven by patients and the communities where patients have tools in their hands to manage their own health and uh there are three key components apart from a six layered component that we have adherence and self management of treatment remote consultation and counseling and active ground building tools in form of bcc behavior change communication tools that are embedded in the toolkit that is designed for the patient so in the in the the self management and adherence reporting toolkit because it is deriving from dots direct observation and treatment short course which is a WHO standard so acts is a reverse where the dots is a top-down model where it acts as a bottom of order where people report their adherence by themselves and they're motivated enough to report their adherence and they do video based adherence and the videos are captured in low resource and lower resolution videos are captured they're detected at the device side and they're taking off medication is is reported to the system they can schedule their labs they can schedule their treatment plans they can schedule they can the next component is consulting with the doctors remotely because this was a major thing because it's a long and third component is where we supply them with digital storytelling gamified tools and learning tools over device and it is based on the behavior of the user behavior of adherence of the user and it's like talking comics in local language so the business model of the solution is is spread over three key components the freedom model with the adherence and because it's a life-saving model and it is based on the health impact sorry health impact and the remote consultation is a paid model where a patient pays 25 cents for consultation or $2 for a full treatment plan and BCC model is a value-added services model which is a sponsorship model where organization want to communicate with the patients they can use this so some of the fit is that we are working with FCDO in Rwanda and Uganda we have over 2,000 patients in Rwanda right now we are in five districts with department science and technology in Mewar we have worked closely with all the NTLP's national TV literacy programs of the countries that we work with recently we won the best project award for JNJ to replicate it on brand resistant TV which we are doing in Mewar and these are some of the you know people who are using our device our tools and so for the South-South cooperation we have an organization called Zerimki Africa which is based out of Kampala and we are working and we've been invited by Quebec to start our French francophone version in Senegal so we shall be doing that soon all the tools are customizable through the platform that we have created we are already using the platform to produce content because we are talking about last my communities most of the tools are talking toolkits they talk to the people and interactive talking intuitively interactive and talking toolkits so our toolkits right now are in Rwanda, Lusuga, in Ronyankole we are doing in Swaheli we are doing it in four different languages in India this is our team where Dr. Imanafasi she's the head of the TV program and then we have other members of the team so thank you thank you very much Subhi and you're targeting indeed a very severe and a very large-scale world problem so thank you very much for this presentation and we already have hands up from the jury Pumza over to you to ask her question thank you very much Julia Subhi well done it may seem stressful but you are really touching on a very important solution one question and I think what I liked was it seems like it's something that's built around the user the comment around the low resolution for self management and all of those things those things were really good for me because they mean that you develop the solution around the main user one question for me on the partnerships I don't see the Department of Health is there an intention in future to include the Department of Health as part of the partnerships and the second part around your subscription model you said it's $25 per consultation and $20 per annum for any person who just wants to be on the solution just to read you know the videos on training what do they do what is their cost thank you Pumza thank you and Sami yes I think this is really great work I'm just curious about the number of people or the number of consultations not number of people the number of consultations administrated by your application their country we we I see the picture from Uganda in front of us we saw pictures also from India so statistics okay and also how can the profession of health services is always governed by very restrictive rules in every country okay who is supposed to provide the service and all of that so how can you make sure that the the local rules regarding the profession of health services are respected or are reflected in in the ad itself thank you thank you very much Sami Rajat so we thanks very much for that presentation thanks Yulia so I just have a question you've mentioned that reporting of TV cases during COVID-19 reduced dramatically and I'm sorry if I missed it but from what I understood that your your solution sort of promotes that so could you sort of share some statistics in terms of the rise in self-reporting of of TV cases I think that's going to be a very interesting number thanks thank you Rajat another question on statistics aren't yeah I'm interested in your ideas about scaling this also to other diseases because it seems like this could easily be branched out and not just be focused on TV and I also wonder whether it is more the starting point for users is with the professional in the hospital talking to a patient saying I want to recommend this to you or where do you start how do you pick up users thank you thank you aren't Gaian over to you thank you so in a B2C I thank you so be first for the presentation in a B2C application like this a lot needs to be done for people to be aware of your solution so in other words what is your advertising strategy on this one thank you Gaian and Victoria wonderful wonderful you know technology to the arms point I also would like to know whether this technology can be scaled into the other diseases as well and also my other question is that in Africa access to internet is easier than India and how are you going to solve the you know kind of a problem of access to internet because at the end of a day they need to digitally record and and send a video and I want to know whether are you going to partner with any technologies that already working on the areas without any internet or are you going to develop that thank you Victoria and so me it's your turn to answer all those questions you've got many see first of all the first question I'm sorry a lot I did not write the names I think it was some new digital are we working in the department again so this primarily works with the department we are actually redesigning the top-down model of dots at the health department and where I mentioned NTLPs that is national TV and literacy programs of the world in India it's called the next day or the NTB program it's national TV program India we are in partnership with that at state level and district level at every wherever we go we have to partner with at least minimum with the district level TV program and new permission from the national so everything is designed by getting validation from the national TV program second when there was a question that you know we are charging 25 we are not charging $25 for consultation it is $0.25 per consultation that we are charging and $2 per consultation for the full course of the treatment on an average the course of TV treatment although it's called the short short short term course it is nine months for minimum short term HDR it is six months so we expect that a patient will come on to the platform at least once in two months because the treatment is very tough and the drugs are very tough and they get a lot of adverse reactions and things and they often have no access to any health consultant or counseling centers to get to understand their problems and get the resolution to a problem so right now the costs are low and we are trying to keep it low and getting it subsidized by the government that if the costs go up the government will subsidize because we are cutting on a lot of costs on health models of the system that is the second so there was another question which was about how in every country recently you know during the covid time this is siding from racha when he asked it during the covid times what is the proof that we have see if you see this picture this is during the covid times when under this program we start we came up with two tools screening on the wall where there is screening tool on the wall where you can you can screen yourself through a wall paper wallpaper of screening or you can use a self screen toolkit with a comic based toolkit that you can use and it will send the message to the nearest dnc about the state of the condition of the person in terms of symptomatic condition and the sputum collector will come to the come to the house of the patient and because we are we are dealing with a lot of missing women cases and in the in the pilot that we did in mivad during the covid times when we actually started before covid and all of a sudden when the covid suck we have we had to see we work with a progressive innovation design model so it is not that we have a fixed model that we have designed started with but we see a condition of the ground and and do a progressive design model we're bringing new tools into the system and we came up with these ideas and we were able to create where the you know the notification of women was almost 20 less than the men we were able to bring them to par and we crossed the target line of 3200 patients being boarded as compared to last last year where we had 2700 patients in a non-covid period time so and the next is idea of scaling up we have a platform called adhere dot global and our mission and vision of this program is to create a universal tb plus management platform for Africa we will provide all these tools free but we also provide behavior change communication tools as a strategy to different parts of countries of Africa 54 countries the population sizes almost seem as that of India and provide localized contextualized tools in the hands of the patients to build the capacity in a whatever design model it's foremost important to build the capacity of the ground we just by provisioning some tools cannot change the ground unless we provide right appropriate tools in the hands of the people so we shall be taking control only of the value-added services and consultation power and rest always go free to the national tb programs to manage right now we are doing the same in Uganda and Rwanda in Uganda the government of the NTLP has source fund from global fund global fund for tb like this tb malaria and HIV AIDS where they are not not giving any funds to us but they are providing for all technology support to be established in Uganda to run this program and we are providing all the tools and technologies setting them up localized at the NTLP Uganda to run them for Uganda and we have to do seven languages already for customizing the whole thing you know this is a customization platform that exists next question was from other diseases yes when tb or any other infectious diseases with a long-term treatment courses it is an appropriate and it is for the high budget because high budget reasons and because if it is a low burden area then the cost of technology overshoots the cost of implementation when it is a high burden it covers up because there's a lot of redundancy of things happening we have a layer where we have recently created called active ground screening where we keep on screening the ground through an AI platform and the results of the ground tell us where do we deploy our technology or where do we deploy a particular tool if it is for the woman in a particular village or it is for men or it is for farmers it is for someone so it accurately tells us how the distribution and resources needs to be done which seems a lot of funds and which are you know equitable in the philosophy equitable distribution everything everybody you need not because certain communities do not need that so last question was you know Africa yes internet internet is a challenge but this whole tool is designed as an offline tool you can be on a 15-day regimen and not report but once you get in touch with the connective area connectivity area because it's a low resource videos so it can send immediately the SMS about that you have taken the medicine but evidence-based videos can be pushed later on and and the volume of the data of a video is hardly 200 kbs so if you're sending 30 videos a month for daily reporting it is hardly not even 200 mb so it is very cost effective and because otherwise the patient has to travel every day to the center to report or somebody from the center has to come under direct observation the definition of direct observation is that the patient has to be present before the provider or the provider has to be so it cuts shots on all that and the patient is free and do so initially when we started you know there are certain difficulties that people think that you know why should we but as it takes up you know when five percent of the patients take it up it shoots like anything in Meywar which is the lowest literacy state in the district of India with 32 percent women literacy and 61 percent male literacy right now all our patients I think we have 1600 patients the moment now all women patients are on device on active on PAX model we give a choice to the patient to and we give pros and cons of dot model and PAX model and let them choose by themselves and we have at every center our own representative talk to them and give them the do's and don'ts of everything and then and we have provision also learning of devices to patients especially those patients who cannot afford a device or do not have a device and we train them to use it and especially these are women because women generally do not have devices in you know remote sitting so we provide provision and own them a device and there has never been a case there have been cases that device got broken or but there has never been a case that device was not written back to us. Thank you very much so Pete that was very comprehensive you really provided all the details that our jury requested so thank you very much for that I would just very briefly like to reiterate the point you made but there was a question on swap card that came around the support from government from the government of India to this program and the data protection aspect so you mentioned it so because it's such an important point I would just like to confirm to Linda Pagash and everyone else who might be wondering this is a program that has the support of the Ministry of Health and is compliant with the data privacy regulations of India and with that I think we we heard it all thank you very much so Pete for your project and for presenting it in such a comprehensive way and we can now move to Jordan and or Victoria did you have something to add I see your hand is up you mute it or Sameh I see you just got the point the point about the statistics per country sorry so right now in Uganda we have five thousand five thousand two hundred patients in in five districts and the adherence rate which was actually sixty seven percent has risen to eighty one percent the treatment cure rates from seventy nine percent has gone to ninety one percent because this is a comprehensive toolkit that motivates and educates on the runtime and the patients not only are reporting so reporting is a data statistics alone for this for the national TV program of Uganda but for the patient it's important to understand why and why should they be on this treatment why should not they because what happens after one month of treatment when the cough is gone the thing that it's time to give up the medicine so but they're still infectious they have not gone through for the first test so the whole treatment cycle has improved in terms of treatment outcomes in in Rwanda we just have 800 patients we've just started we have we have been approached by Ethiopia we have been approached by Senegal in fact we started our program in Afghanistan we would need to wrap it up here because we need to to give the time for the for the remaining participants to also pitch their ideas thank you very much indeed moving on to Jordan and Mr. Omar Ahmad Al-Majali Katabe app Omar the floor is yours hello hi can you see my screen now we do okay great hello i'm Omar Al-Majali from Jordan and i'm proud to present Katabe Katabe we we are a registered LLC in Jordan we present Jordanian education and technology experts with the ultimate goal of building a safe space for our kids to learn online while new social media technologies have become widespread especially with COVID most parents don't think they have made parenting any easier why is that because of things like smartphone addiction you know that our kids are spending more than 15 hours 1500 hours per year on their phones this is a serious issue for around 80 percent of families and a daily argument for more than 30 other than that we have abuse and harassment more than half of the girls surveyed by plan international from around the world have been harassed and abused online and we all know how dangerous it can be online the internet is just like a pipeline if you open it you don't know where the kid would leave that's why we have global guidelines thanks to UNICEF and ITU we have guidelines for that but we need to act upon it that's why Katabe is developing a mobile app to help young parents protect their kids online for free while providing fun and engaging education content tailored to each kid's age what's unique about Katabe MVP which is ready to launch will be launched next week that we combine many mobile device management features such as app control wake up time and sleep time with education where the child will get more screen time by answering daily quizzes depending on each child's age while allowing parents to add daily milestones and tasks to their kid that they have to do before playing their favorite apps plus we are so proud of our safe space feature where we block access to all inappropriate content and even block up pop-up ads inside the games our business model is premium our mvp is totally free and all the basic features will be free forever but we are we have a huge roadmap of premium features that will be paid our latest achievements that we graduated from Movadrum grant program and we got 25 uh 25 000 euros that helped us to develop the mvp and we were selected by the investment trading track in jordan in september this year and ketabi was selected by founder institute for their levant virtual summer program 2021 but that's not enough this is the mvp it's not our end product our end product is that we need to build an educational portal not just a safe space a safe space but with an educational portal inside of it but ketabi was not content creators we want to help parents invest in genuine verified educational content that fits their car their child their kids needs where each content creator will have the liberty to price their own content at least 10 percent of all the educational content shall be free and 80 percent of the profit will go back to the content creators no targeted ads and no selling your kids profiles our plan of how we fund how we use the the fund we will recruit content management team we will start the development efforts for phase two the educational portal we will invest in translating the app to other languages french spanish we have it in arabic and english and we will help promote south and south collaboration by expanding our presence to new countries and invest in partnerships with local content creators in each country in the global south region we ketabi we believe that the future of the world depends on our education on our kids education now and providing the best affordable tools that technology can provide is our duty for the next generation we're taking the first step join us thank you thank you very much i'm ready to join you i can definitely relate to the challenges parents may have in managing screen time and ensuring a safe experience for kids so very well done on the idea and the concept sounds fabulous um i would ask the jury to put up their hands for their questions please and i have art first thanks interesting presentation thank you very much very dynamic as well well done i was wondering for your path forward where you talk about creating an education portal whether you have considered working in partnership with existing providers what are you looking for in terms of content and can you share maybe some of the companies that you respect that you admire in the space that you want to be like but maybe adapt and then change and offer in a different way thank you thank you aren't and we would also take the question from sami thank you very much in fact it's a solution or a plan solution for a genuine problem two questions what are your competitors if you know your competitors how did you manage to be i mean to provide the better features this is one second the the product as it stands is about controlling the the screen time for the kids do you think that the the name of the solution kitabi will help you in the branding because you didn't reach the education or the content yet yet so how do you how do you think about branding using kitabi kitabi is my book by the way it's arabic word means my book yeah thank you thank you sami silvia yeah thank you very much very also interesting and that we're approaching let's say another solution in this case that in one some way will benefit children and i wanted just to ask you two questions because it was a bit unclear to me and your explanation if then the target group is just the parents and then the parents would then benefit from this platform and from this tool or also children and then i wanted to ask you as you know itu as developed was around 100 partners to child online protection guidelines and we focus precisely on children parents policy makers in the private sector so i wanted to know if you were aware of these guidelines and and if you used them in any way thank you thank you very much silvia and rajat um my thanks very much i think you've touched on and exceeding the important topic of the data protection issues around children i just had one question to your point of screen time control what is the unique component of your solution as opposed to just a screen time limiter that's built into many uh smartphones these days thank you rajat and we have no more questions from the jury at this point so i'm over to you thank you for your questions you touched on very important points i just want to make something clear most of you ask the same question what is kitabi and why we name it kitabi when i was pitching the mvp everybody was asking me why you name it kitabi it's you should name it like a lock something but the mvp that i explained to you it's not my end product my end product is that the kid will the mvp that we created the safe space and we prove that it works the next step is that we will add the educational portal inside of it eventually the parent will be able to give the phone to his kids and will not worry about anything related to content abuse or maybe harassment okay excuse me excuse me to interrupt you would you be able please to to put your camera on so we can see you i i have my camera on hold on stop and start it's it's on no i have it on i don't see well we see you now thank you very much it's just okay for the first question regarding existing providers as i told you we're building an educational portal that's why we name it kitabi when we explain the mvp the mvp is just a safe space okay but the safe space is not our end product our end product is the educational portal that we will build that we will be building inside the safe space okay now existing providers yes there there are a lot of providers that give education content like abwab like maybe youtube kids you have education content there but it's not purely education and providers such as abwab they focus on secondary education they don't focus on kids our platform mainly focus on kids under 12 years old those are the ones who they don't read they just click so they really need our protection okay the other question regarding competition there are a lot of platforms that do mdm mobile device management safe kids samsung apple does it okay but what makes kitabi unique is that we take those mdm functionality and we add education to the mix currently our mvp i'll give you a simple example okay as a parent you you install the app and you'll give it to the kid the kid there is a wake time okay after nine after nine am the kids use the app if you you as a parent you can add daily milestones clean up your room after he cleans up your room he will have access to the apps that the parent already approved okay and we have the safe space even if you open the browser for him he will not be able to access any inappropriate content and even the ads inside the games if you ever played video games mobile app games you will be shocked by the apps the ads pop up that you will have inside the games and we will be we are able to protect from it this is what this is what kitabi is that's why we call it kitabi it's an educational portal this is our end product okay for the targeting group as i told you i'm targeting kids under 12 that's why our main targets are young parents with kids under 12 years old we have global guidelines done by itu done by unicef but with kitabi we are able to enforce it and this is totally free how we get revenue we get revenue from premium features that we will be adding plus we will have a revenue share with content creators we have a lot of companies that does content for kids we we discovered a lot of them we said we saw a lot with a lot of them and we will we want to encourage everyone that can be can create such content to teach colors to teach numbers maybe 10 seconds clip everyone can do it and we want to build such content for our kids hopefully i answered the your questions does anyone have any other question i think there is an additional question from victoria and then uh thank you uh congratulations on what you built i want to know what your business model later so are you going to approach it by providing this software to the schools in the beginning and then you know later on kind of grow it into the commercialize of parents or are you immediately going to go to the parents directly and start launching this after the mvp comes out that's a very very interesting question victoria because schools it's in our phase three our phase two that we will be building is that we will be targeting directly parents to install it on their own phones now the next step clearly that we will be approaching university schools to have their own curriculum on kitabi that they can maybe have a virtual mentor or the teacher they can access to see how the kids uh answer quizzes and questions this is something that we will be exploring in phase three but for now we are building a platform that can make that can help us make our kids safe online i know that around the world a lot of people don't have access to the internet that's so sad but even the ones who have access to the internet the internet is not perfect guys we need to make it protected for our kids thank you very much armor thank you for uh contributing to the global effort to keep children safe on the internet thank you very much indeed and with that we are now moving back to africa and um more particularly to kenya with miss pristine kawake and i love the name of her project the wheels of life christine the floor is yours thank you so much uh indeed we are glad to have joined this challenge today and uh you're going to allow me to share my screen and we can see your screen now christine you can start when you're ready she's muted you're muted are you able to unmute yourself christine i think that christine she's not muted but she has an issue with her mic um can we write to her okay may i suggest then that we go to the next inventor and hopefully in between christine we'll be able to fix her mic yeah what what i would suggest maybe to reconnect sometimes it sometimes it helps now she's muted let's try to unmute and christine do you hear us it seems that you have your headphones but it it is not connected apparently i i um i would suggest you to reconnect maybe it will help and let's see later okay julia back to you thank you thank you adenia um i would um then now move to our um next inventor from nigeria david david a ali is david with us first of all with the community e-learning digital infrastructure project yeah i am are you ready to present a little bit earlier david well if the situation demands it i will we would definitely appreciate if you can um get it going with your presentation um and that would give christine some time to to fix her technical problem thank you very much we see your screen see you see the screen yes i can see the timing okay so my name is david david ali i'm presenting on community e-learning digital infrastructure there are three main problems that we're trying to solve through this solution uh there is a lot of access to quality standard education and then we also know that there are many crises in education in most of our countries and part of this problem is linked to in part of digital divide which was accentuated during the covid pandemic lockdown of schools uh the people that are affected by this problem are children and other learners from four families attending government public school in rural communities and in nigeria they are mostly from the northern part of the country because that's where we have a lot of challenges that are not uh some of them are human created and um the scope of the people we're looking at as uh documented by unicef and these are not these are conservative figures uh we have more than 10.5 million out of school children uh iom deals with internally displayed people we have more than 2.1 million at their last count and then there is the crisis the digital divide crisis and the learning crisis in education is well documented by the world bank in the world education report 2018 learning to realize education so our proposition is that we are deploying digital infrastructure in rural communities using all this shelf one-time post-opponent technologies to provide access to learning for more than 10.5 million children and other categories of learners living in rural communities hosting uh research to internally display persons we are data assessing the digital infrastructure is complete and private to the rural community and it covers up to a distance of up to 10 kilometer and it's accessible in schools homes correction correction assistant firms uh using tv y space and wi-fi solar system edge servers shared access devices available within the community we put everything in the community this is uh a sample of uh David um apologies uh but you're breaking up maybe you can try to switch off your camera uh while you're presenting uh maybe that would improve a little bit the the quality of the sound because it would be a pity not to not to get your message thank you okay please go on can you see the screen now yes okay um okay um so um I I start here all the proposition and at all within that circle is a circle of less than 10 kilometers and you have all sorts of people different categories of learners that can assess the network very cool there uh business scale of our diagram we will come back to the diagram later but uh what is the business model we're targeting the very very poor and disadvantaged people so we expect that to mobilize resources from known as government uh government that copies uh grant challenges like this we've been applying for things like this and we've gotten some uh some were not successful so what's the sustainability and scalability problem uh we know the funding of education and interventions that work it will always be government priority especially when it has to do with things like educational health and Greek and what are you so um we we we we we depend on that and then we also uh want the community to own the entire infrastructure that we're putting in their care we're going to train them to do all the things that are necessary uh the business the business scale horizontally and vertically uh other users that are within the network that do not uh that have access to maybe their own devices they can assess the uh content that is provided within that network uh people can who can afford the devices will do that vertically this infrastructure can scale up to provide paid for internet access within the community and we could also use it for other services such as digital village initiative if we're always trying to do something about that remote health and this is something like that UNICEF took uh Microsoft they are also pushing for there is a pilot program going on in Uganda on that so what are the evidences uh to date uh we got a grant from uh learning equality and uh we have a grant number of these and uh we have about 15,000 dollars to pilot a similar digital infrastructure program but just in 2019 David yes um uh we're technically out of time so I would ask you please to wrap up in another 30 seconds okay so we also but we you we use that uh grant to uh actually uh got additional funding from voucher states which is we got to my 110,000 dollars to do that program before that will be demo and then of course we have all these program video and links that we have online for that uh this is something we're looking for will be used to seek for additional funding in order to take the solution if we can use it thank you thank you very much David and unfortunately we had some some difficulty really hearing well what you were saying but hopefully the jury has got the essence of it so I would ask the jurors to put their hands up um if they have any questions Fumza thank you very much Julia David my heart goes out to you for the technical glitches but we did hear the essence of the presentation a very well thought out idea the only question I have for you is certain countries are moving towards the regulation of of TV white spaces the spectrum around the TV white spaces are you are you planning to maybe do any lobbying with the government and the regulator for you know assuring the sustainability of your model thank you Fumza an important question indeed I mean regulatory predictability ease of factor in developing such initiatives Victoria over to you my apologies uh my connection was so bad so the amount of receiving from the concept was so bad so I I kind of pass okay no no no worries understood Rajat over to you thanks very much I really like your presentation I mean of course technical glitches notwithstanding and I think the work that you're doing with IVPs is a particularly important one so just to that point again my question to a similar project earlier was with regards to access to technology so individual devices or are you trying to focus more on community devices and if so if possible if you can just sort of run us through the broader business model of how you intend to deploy this project thanks thank you that would allow us to get maybe the detail we weren't able to get the first time around and Jonathan over to you thank you my question pertains the infrastructure costs related to TV white spaces etc but can you give us an idea on the costings and are you convinced that the philanthropic individuals will cover those costs thank you thank you Jonathan Fumza do you have a follow-up point at this point no okay so now we can give back the floor to David for a response to all these questions David over to okay thank you for the questions I guess one of the challenges that we have that we face in most global south country of the south-south countries is this internet access issue and the reliability all through the day this happened to be the peak period of a business peak period where I am maybe that's why one of the why the problem is like that now concerning the TV white space regulation yeah sure we are aware of that but we TV white space we we feel that we are we can engage the government because since it's a space that is being left behind by digital switchable we have even I saw somebody that worked with an african telecommunication union that I said maybe we may have a link up I met him on this platform uh to it's for them to block out some band for this public goods use because TV transmission on anything like that is regionalized it's localized so it is easier to block out a band of frequency specifically for public good use that is what I think we may need to do concerning that then access to technology what we're trying to do is to put everything solar system the devices everything in the community and let the community owns that the infrastructure we're going to be training people to manage it and to because I say there's one time cost of punash the way we're doing the we're following the budget cycle for the back end equipment for the front end equipment those are the access equipment like the phones and things like that those ones are cheap they are easily replaceable and things like that so basic infrastructure across the cost we have for a community and to provide all the um all the assets within a three kilometer wi-fi radius it's about sixty thousand community and like I said it is possible for us to scale up using all the newer technology that is coming on like the low-heat orbit satellite and things like that so that those are the uh the the answer that I have to your question for now thank you very much David that was very comprehensive I I think we managed to get those details that didn't come through the first time so thank you very much indeed and I see no more questions from the jury so with that we can now move to our last participant for today our last inventor and we keep our fingers crossed for Christine's connection to be to work out and her sound as well Christine are you back yes I am perfect perfect so we'll give just a few seconds for for the screens to swap and we can you can start when you're ready Evgenia are we having difficulties again Christine are you still there I don't see her in the in the list of panelists before she was in the attendees and now I don't see her she probably dropped again because she she did say she was there uh and then she yeah yeah I'm sorry about that maybe I can take that minute to remind everyone to spread the world on social media using the hashtags of this event rediscover innovation and south south cooperation so please hashtag your social media posts with those words and we can give it another minute for Christine to come back okay very unfortunately I don't see Christine in the list of panelists or in the list of attendees Evgenia do you think that we would be able to get her back I think if you can contact her I know we are she's not in the list she's not connected we'll try to do that as quickly as possible thank you yeah we can give it a maybe one more minute if not I think we can close the session and we'll be inviting to the jury to a debrief room which will be a separate zoom link that you will receive and of course maybe let's give her another 30 seconds it would be just such a pity not to give her the opportunity to pitch her idea okay we're five minutes beyond the time so I guess that as unfortunate as it can be we should stop here and I guess Christine's pitch will still run in the competition mode is that correct even if she's not able to present it yes I think for technical reasons we'll try to schedule it for tomorrow there's actually two other people who did not make it today well total three total three will be I mean deferred to tomorrow I guess right yes for tomorrow yes three three three uh yeah so same time tomorrow so I'm not sure where you are Samir right well the the job of the moderator tomorrow is going to be even tougher because that would make it for 16 pitches within three hours that's going to be really tight but hopefully you would be able to make it with that then I would like to really thank everyone for your engagement it's been a very full three hours of pitches and discussion we we heard some very powerful ideas some some very promising solutions and very valuable kind of impact for also proposition so hopefully the jury would will choose the best of those and they will go forward so thanks very much to all the innovators for for making those pitches and for putting forward their ideas a big thanks to the jury for your engagement for very active participation for the very very valuable insights as well and good luck for the deliberations it's not going to be easy indeed and it goes without saying but I'll still say it to you those two more baffling engineering the challenge and for the outstanding community building work without him this wouldn't have been possible at all and finally a big thanks to all the participants who joined over swap card and who have been with us for the journey thank you very much indeed and hopefully you found this inspiration and hopefully next year you'll come back here with your ideas and we will be listening to your pitches again and with that we can stop here and I hope to see all of you tomorrow the same time for the second day of pitching thank you very much indeed so Julia thank you very much for your excellent moderation as usual but I just want to say to our colleagues from the UN SouthSouth cooperation team I would be sending you the link as well if you would like to join this short deliberations but thank you so I'm going to send this in 30 seconds maybe you can take two three minutes break if you'd like but the room is already open thank you okay but we disconnect from this thing this is correct okay so are you going to send a link Mo are you going to send a link I'm sending it I'm sending it in email right now fantastic thank you thank you thank you Evina can we stop the streaming sure thank you