Eco-fuel Africa uses low-cost and tailor made technologies to create a new breed of clean energy entrepreneurs in Uganda and exploit mobile phone based technologies like SMS and Mobile Money to ensure that their entrepreneurs turn our technologies into viable businesses. They plan to use their technology to create a new breed of clean energy micro-entrepreneurs in Africa through a micro-franchising model that they have successfully piloted in a town called Lugazi in Uganda.
80% of ...
More than 200 million women in developing countries have an unmet need for contraception. Contraceptive implants, which are inserted under the skin of a woman’s upper arm, are a safe and highly effective family planning method and provide continuous protection from pregnancy for 3-5 years, depending on the type of implant. This makes them ideal for women with limited access to health care services because they do not require regular resupply from a provider. Although ...
Womankind Worldwide believes that the entire planet can benefit from women contributing to decision-making processes. They want to make that happen through improving women’s education and promoting women’s rights.
Womankind Worldwide is an international charity that achieves its mission by financially supporting local and national organizations with initiatives that combat violence and discrimination against women. The charity focuses specifically on women in the developing world who are at risk of experiencing violence and have been excluded ...
VOICE 4 Girls is an organization working to combat gender inequality in India. The organization whose full name is Vital Opportunities in Creative Empowerment (VOICE) has a vision of a society where every woman holds the power to make the personal choices that shape her future. They believe that in order for girls succeed in their communities, it is vital that they develop marketable skills and understand the influence that they can have on the ...
The Water Initiative (TWI) aims to combat global water contamination problems by focusing on solutions at the household level. Traditional water treatment plants are expensive to build, consume large amounts of energy, and even re-contaminate water during storage and distribution. The Water Initiative has created an alternative by developing “Point-of-Drinking” (POD) water purification devices that are affordable, convenient and effective.
TWI’s innovation lies in customizing its products to local community needs. TWI staff work with community ...
A Liter of Light is a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring the eco-friendly Solar Bottle Light to underprivileged communities worldwide. MyShelter Foundation, in conjunction with the Development Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has created solar bottle bulbs made of recycled plastic soda bottles that can illuminate a forty-square meter room brighter than a fluorescent lamp by at least 55 to 60 watts. A Liter of Light seeks to provide low-income communities ...
Discarded in heaps along roadsides and riverbanks, rice husks are considered waste in many countries heavily dependent on rice as a staple product. However, the Center for Rice Husk Technology (CRHET) is challenging this notion by creating a rice husk gasifier stove that uses rice husks to provide clean and low-cost fuel. Gas produced from just one kilogram of husk can generate an equivalent of 1,920 kilocalories of energy. These stoves, created and developed by ...
The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) is an NGO that helps to conserve the Amazon by working in direct partnership with the indigenous people. Founded in 1996 by ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin and renowned conservationist Liliana Madrigal, ACT has spent the last decade and a half forming partnerships and empowering Amazonian indigenous peoples to protect their land and culture through grassroots conservation.
Unlike traditional conservation models, ACT has been committed to remaining agile, focused, local and empowering. ...
Blue Ventures works on developing networks of locally managed marine protected areas (LMMAs) in the southwest Indian Ocean, catalyzing coastal conservation by demonstrating the lasting economic benefits of sustainable fisheries management. Blue Ventures LMMA programs focus on three zones along Madagascar’s west coast, where they work to train and support communities throughout these LMMAs to monitor their natural resources and implement management systems that will enable them to stop or reverse the severe decline in ...
Forest Trends’ water initiative aims to bring effective and equitable investments for watershed services solutions at scale in order to widely realize this innovative and critically important approach to the global water crisis. Investments in watershed services (IWS) foster efficient use and management of the worlds’ natural infrastructure through the use of market-like mechanisms. The concept of IWS is not new, but Forest Trends wants to work towards making IWS reach its full potential. They ...
The Mitsubishi Air-Lubrication System (MALS), developed by the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Corporation, is a technology designed to reduce the skin-friction resistance on the hull of a ship by sending air to the bottom of the hull to create a layer of air bubbles between the hull and seawater. Accelerating the development of innovative technologies to reduce CO2 emissions from vessels is essential to cope with rising fuel costs and improve the environment. The simplest way ...
LanX is a South Central Pennsylvania prototype of a local securities offering and trading platform aimed at channeling growth capital to local small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), particularly those that are committed to sustainability and job creation in their local communities. To create jobs and sustainable local economies, local capital markets can be used because they operate similarly to a utility or social purpose business.
Local communities are at a competitive disadvantage compared to larger ...
Solidarium is an organization that provides a link between local Brazilian sellers and artisans, and larger retail companies in the U.S. These sellers, which are 95% women and 5% men, come from poor communities and have likely only sold their goods locally, never having traveled outside of their communities. Solidarium creates market channels that allow locally produced goods to be sold abroad in order to stimulate higher incomes for the people producing these goods in ...
Coming from a farming family in California, CEO Greg Ryan Jr. saw the benefits of recycling water as a priority and opportunity for entrepreneurship. Pasteurization Technology Group seeks to revolutionize the disinfection of wastewater using a patented “two-for-one” technology, eliminating toxic chemicals and intensive electricity usage in the process.
The “two-for-one” system combines wastewater disinfection with the generation of renewable energy, creating the most energy-efficient and lowest-cost solution available. Utilizing biogas, typically wasted exhaust heat is ...
Transportation is a huge obstacle for people with disabilities, who are often unnecessarily disconnected from their communities. The idea behind the Kenguru car is to allow people in wheelchairs to gain mobility and independence in their communities. The car is a small, efficient, closed body type wheelchair-fitting vehicle that provides very easy and quick access to its interior, so that wheelchair users don’t have to rely on the expensive and inefficient add-ons to mini-vans. With ...
International Development Enterprises India (IDEI), works to provide irrigation solutions to small farmers- smallholder farmers constitute 75% of India’s farmers and often remain trapped in an ongoing cycle of hunger and poverty due to small allotments of land. IDEI has played an important role in researching and developing low cost, scaled to small plot size, environmentally friendly irrigation technologies. Among these technologies are the treadle pump, which is a foot operated water lifting device, and ...
The Living Building Challenge integrates the built world with the natural world. It is a holistic green building program that promotes the highest possible level of environmental performance through the creation of projects that “operate as cleanly, beautifully, and efficiently as nature’s architecture”. The Challenge accepts projects of all sizes; from smaller scaled projects in the form of individual structures, to larger scaled projects of entire neighborhoods and communities. For a project to attain certification ...
The Kéré Architecture group is founded on the idea that good education and training are the basis for any social, professional, and economic development, and that a strong social consciousness and a focus on cultural, economical and ecological building solutions can vastly improve education conditions.
The group designed a secondary school complex that is inspired by the traditional rural homes in Burkina Faso. They have maintained a strong focus on sustainability, designing the school with the ...
Holomic LLC emerged from the groundbreaking mobile optical microscopy research conducted by Dr. Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA’s BioPhotonics Laboratory. Fueled by the belief that diagnostic tools should be portable and cost-effective enough to be used anywhere they are needed, Dr. Ozcan and his researchers have created modified microscopes, cytometers, and other diagnostic devices that can be attached to ordinary cell phones and used in the field.
This already award-winning technology uses lens-free attachments that allow cell ...
The current method for administering vaccinations, the syringe/needle (S/N) system, poses many logistical difficulties including transport, vaccine deterioration/waste, and high system costs. Created by Gijsbert van de Wijdeven, the Bioneedle Technology Group aims to replace the S/N method with an easier, less wasteful, more cost-effective system.
Recognized by WHO as a breakthrough medical technology, Bioneedles, or “tiny, biodegradable mini-implants,” come prefilled and contain vaccines in a thermally stable environment. They are administered via sub-dermal application and ...
Experts suggest that 30% of urban traffic is caused by drivers looking for parking spaces. In order to combat this problem and reduce emissions, Streetline is using wireless mesh sensor networks to connect parking spaces with mobile parking applications. Streetline’s Smart Parking platform detects the presence of cars through its network of low power wireless sensors to provide real-time data and analytics to cities, universities, private parking operators, transit agencies, and drivers. Drivers can use ...
Humblefactory.com is a design laboratory that develops tools, materials, manufacturing techniques, and design frameworks for small-scale designers to create more useful, capable products using the local resources available to them. Alchematter is a platform being developed by The Humblefactory which allows designers around the world to share and remix designs for open source objects.
Alchematter allows designers from around the world to tap into the global collective expertise and remix or adapt these designs to fit ...
StatPlanet is an interactive and visualization software produced by Statsilk.com. The StatPlanet application can be used to create user-friendly interactive maps and
visualizations, empowering organizations to better communicate and disseminate information and to better analyze data based on their needs. Through StatPlanet, users are no longer passive recipients of information – they are able to interact with graphs, maps and tables. StatPlanet was designed for non-technical users, but has features that will interest more advanced users ...
The Gender Equality Project Foundation (GEPF) works with large corporations to foster equal opportunities in the workplace by building a community committed to greater accountability in gender equality. GEPF’s best ambassadors are its seven pilot companies that worked with the foundation to streamline its approach, as well as the additional ten multinational companies that are part of its growing community.
GEPF has found that commitments to assist the growth of gender equality did not necessarily translate ...
Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies (ET3) is a company based out of Colorado that is dedicated to the promotion of “Space Travel on Earth,” a network of sealed tubes that could propel people and commodities throughout the world safely, sustainably, efficiently and extremely quickly. The ultimate vision of the company is a global system that would carry 90 percent of the goods and passengers transported greater than a 30 mile distance.
This network would be designed with ...
The AguaClara Program is a research program at Cornell University that produces engineering designs for reliable and sustainable municipal-scale water treatment plants.
The AguaClara program has avoided many of the challenges to sustainability faced by community-sized treatment plants by developing a suite of water treatment technology that is able to meet US EPA standards for drinking water without the use of any electricity or high-tech equipment that depends on overseas supply chains. The gravity-powered design is ...
Liquid Metal Battery Corporation (LMBC) is an energy storage company that aims to universally reduce the cost of electricity in the industrialized world and beyond by commercializing a new battery technology. Their initiative plans to create a cost-effective, reliable, grid-scale battery that will lead to the integration of renewable energy, alleviate grid congestion, and reduce power plant activity. The key features of the battery are its long lifespan, low cost, scalable design and flexibility in ...
Embrace aims to improve maternal and child health through an innovative technology delivery method that reaches some of the most vulnerable populations. Their strategy involves identifying new products with the greatest probability to improve health outcomes in developing countries and enhancing their manufacturing and delivery processes to get those products to the people who need them most.
Embrace distributes and provides training on the Infant Warmer, an inexpensive medical technology that gives thermal support to premature ...
Communication for Change (C-Change) is a cooperative agreement with partners in the US and developing countries that aims to increase the efficiency and sustainability of social and behavior change communication (SBCC) in order to improve health and development. SBCC is the implementation of interactive evidence and theory based communication processes and strategies to assist individuals, communities, and societies when addressing controversial change. C-Change proposes to address the allocation of health and development communication skills in ...
YikeBike is an organization dedicated to providing an alternative source of transportation to solve the problem of congested transport in crowded cities. Bicycles remain the most popular transport device in the world after 120 years with unchanged design. After observing the shortcomings of traditional two wheel bikes, the creators of YikeBike set out to create a sustainable alternative inspired by the Segway to help commuters move around urban cities.
The YikeBike model is effectively the world’s ...
Asthmapolis was developed to improve the management of asthma for both patients and health care professionals. Despite recent advancements in understanding the disease, mortality rates from asthma have ceased to fall. Using specialized inhaler sensors that are linked to mobile and internet applications, Asthmapolis has created a way to objectively track asthma flare-ups in real time and record the location in which they occur.
As part of the Asthmapolis push for smarter management of asthma, the ...
Ossian Agro Automation Private Limited is an organization dedicated to improving the process of irrigation, first in India and then globally. Created as a solution to irrigation problems, Ossian developed several affordable irrigation pumps that can be electronically controlled based on an alarm clock timer. Nano Ganesh is an electronic modem that enables farmers to regulate their irrigation pumps at any time through mobile phones. While computers are expensive, this remote is one quarter the ...
MIT SENSEable City Lab designed a program called Forage Tracking to make informal waste recycling cooperates more efficient through the introduction of digital materials. Named for the microeconomic theory of optimal foraging, this program tests the effect of communication technology on recycling cooperatives in Sao Paolo, Brazil. With 500 informal waste recycling cooperates in Sao Paolo employing 60,000 people that collect over 90% of the recycling material, these cooperatives are vital to the sustainability of ...
Foldit focuses on solving challenging biochemistry problems by building a symbiosis between computers and people. This project allows people with little prior experience to quickly develop biochemistry expertise through interaction with a video game. Players collectively solve three-dimensional puzzles that have direct implications for existing scientific problems, creating experts in protein structure prediction. This new collective intelligence has already led to four major published findings over the last year and a half.
The video game that ...
Safe World for Women is a women-led NGO working with grassroots groups to promote women’s empowerment and sustainable development, tackle the root causes of poverty and oppression, and bring positive social and economic change at a global level.
Through their website, the organisation highlights important issues impacting women and children, campaigns for rights defenders and profiles the work of grassroots organisations - Safe World Field Partners.
Safe World for Women is an advocacy organisation with a global ...
Gram Power is a young energy technology startup out of University of California – Berkeley working with the bold mission To Electrify India - Intelligently.
The national electricity grid of India loses nearly 60% of its power due to theft, pilferage and technical losses, as compared to ~7% losses in developed nations. This is the situation, when over 300 million people in India are living off the grid! Most of this population lives in remote rural ...
The GROW BIOINTENSIVE Agriculture Centre of Kenya (G-BIACK) is a community based not for profit organization in Thika, Kenya that promotes biointensive agriculture, which is a form of ecological agriculture where no chemicals are used. The practices used allow for biointensive planting for increased volume and yields. It is already helping thousands of small scale farmers to raise their own food and increase levels of food security through the following practical solutions: small livestock production, ...
Of the 145 million metric tons of fish harvested annually worldwide, nearly 8 million metric tons come from the oceans. Today, marine fish populations are in serious trouble due to overfishing, ecosystem degradation, and inept fisheries management. Unless significant changes are made to how seafood is harvested and consumed, many popular fish species could be commercially extinct by mid-century. This is where Future of Fish comes in: they launched and support a group of networked ...
Liquid Robotics is a data service provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Liquid Robotics has invented and patented a revolutionary vehicle for ocean exploration and data collection called the Wave Glider. The Wave Glider is a marine robot that utilizes the natural energy of waves for propulsion and solar power for navigation and communications. This vehicle uses the space between the surfboard-sized float above water and glider tethered six meters below the surface to create forward ...
The Reef Check Foundation is the worlds largest reef monitoring network. The Reef Check Foundation is a non-profit that started in Southern California in 1996 with a mission to empower local communities through grassroots research, conservation, and education to protect and rehabilitate reefs worldwide. Their conservation efforts are made possible by partnerships with NGOs, local governments, and an extensive volunteer network with over 30,000 citizen scientists in 90 countries and territories. The Reef Check Foundation ...
Maplecroft has created The Climate Innovation Indexes (CII), composed of the Maplecroft Climate Innovation Index US 100, Maplecroft Climate Innovation Index Leaders, and The Maplecroft Climate Innovation Index Benchmark. Maplecroft assesses companies based on “management, mitigation, emissions reductions, innovation and adaptation” and then uses this data to create the CII’s. Innovation holds the greatest weight when calculating the indexes. The companies included in Maplecroft indexes are publicly owned companies with over $1 billion in market ...
The Savory Institute is an organization dedicated to promoting large-scale restoration of the world’s grasslands by implementing Holistic Management. Holistic Management was developed 40 years ago by biologist Allan Savory as a way to save the savannah and its wildlife of Southern Africa from desertification.
While many scientists have put their time and resources into unsuccessful tools for combating desertification, such as technology, fire, and resting the land, The Savory Institute’s unique approach taps into the ...
WikiCell Designs is a technology that was developed to eliminate the use of plastic packaging for food and beverages. WikiCells are tasty edible packages for a variety of foods ranging from yogurt to cocktails. Invented by Harvard professor David Edwards, with the help of designer Francois Azambourg and a team of scientists and designers in Paris, the first WikiCell was exhibited in 2010.
WikiCells are composed of a soft skin suspended in a gel which uses ...
amee wants to solve an important problem by bringing big data and analytics together to enable transparent and consistent environmental insight to drive bottom line benefits. amee supports the proven view that being sustainable is better for business and making sustainability transparent will create financial improvement. Ultimately, amee helps all UK businesses better understand the risks and costs they face in managing finite environment resources such as energy, water, and waste. Through a clearer understanding of ...
WaterCredit, an initiative of Water.org, puts microfinance tools to work in the water and sanitation (watsan) sector. WaterCredit is the first comprehensive program of its kind that connects the microfinance and watsan communities to scale up access to credit and capital for individual- and household-based watsan needs. Through WaterCredit, Water.org aims to channel and redeploy financial resources more efficiently, enabling increasing numbers of people to meet their water and sanitation needs through demand-driven, market-based services.
Under ...
SHFT.com is a multi-media platform that was launched with the mission to encourage a more sustainable approach to consumer lifestyle and behavior through video, design, art, and culture. The organization was founded by film producer Adrian Grenier and actor-filmmaker Peter Glatzer in hopes of creating positive environmental change through consumer decision-making.
The idea was conceived because the founders both desired to better the world by making sustainable decisions in the marketplace, but the execution was daunting. ...
5 Stone Green Capital LLC (5SGC) is an innovative organization on a mission to end homelessness for veterans in Virginia and eventually, all over the world. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs awarded 5SGC 6.8 million US dollars to pursue a prototype to end homelessness for US veterans. By working with partners Ridgewood Technology, Womble Carlisle LLP, and La Cite Development, 5SGC has developed a solution to address homelessness for US Veterans based on five ...
The EcoService Foundation was founding in November of 1990 as Hungary’s first ever eco-consulting office. The foundation’s primary tasks include environmental counseling and education. The organization also sells environmentally friendly products.
Recently, the EcoService Foundation began an Eco-Household Training initiative. This initiative includes a series of workshops aimed at helping urban Hungarians learn to make their households greener. The workshops are typically six weeks long and include topics such as: avoiding, reusing, and reducing waste; energy ...
¡Échale! a tu casa, is an assisted self-build program that provides sustainable community development through social housing production. For an affordable price, program participants can improve their home or build a quality home in just one month – a process that would otherwise take 10-15 years. In Mexico, 5.7 million families live in overcrowded houses made of unstable or dangerous materials. Some 25.8 million people, or almost a fifth of Mexico’s population, do not live ...
The Backpack Farm Agriculture Program (BPF) is an internationally recognized social enterprise aggregating packages of “green” farming inputs and conservation training exclusively to smallholder “commercial” farmers with 2-5 acres of land earning their primary income from horticulture production. The technical program, packaged as an all-in-one backpack of green agriculture inputs (85% organic and biological) needed for smallholder farmers to standardize both the quality and quantity of agriculture production during an annual growing season, to mirror ...
... EyeNETRA envisions satisfying the demand for eye care and vision correction in the developing world, which is estimated to reach up to 2.4 billion people.
Through a radically innovative and affordable mobile eye diagnostic device, EyeNETRA has made eye care accessible for those living in the developing world. The Near Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment (Netra-G), also known as the “EYE Phone,” is a state-of-the-art technology developed at MIT Media Lab that consists of a clip-on eyepiece and software app for smart ...
5 Stone Green Capital LLC (5SGC) is an innovative organization on a mission to end homelessness for veterans in Virginia and eventually, all over the world. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs a
A Liter of Light is a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring the eco-friendly Solar Bottle Light to underprivileged communities worldwide. MyShelter Foundation, in conjunction with the Deve
The AguaClara Program is a research program at Cornell University that produces engineering designs for reliable and sustainable municipal-scale water treatment plants. The AguaClara program has avoid
The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) is an NGO that helps to conserve the Amazon by working in direct partnership with the indigenous people. Founded in 1996 by ethnobotanist Dr. Mark Plotkin and renow
amee wants to solve an important problem by bringing big data and analytics together to enable transparent and consistent environmental insight to drive bottom line benefits. amee supports the proven
Asthmapolis was developed to improve the management of asthma for both patients and health care professionals. Despite recent advancements in understanding the disease, mortality rates from asthma hav
The Backpack Farm Agriculture Program (BPF) is an internationally recognized social enterprise aggregating packages of “green” farming inputs and conservation training exclusively to smallholder “comm
The current method for administering vaccinations, the syringe/needle (S/N) system, poses many logistical difficulties including transport, vaccine deterioration/waste, and high system costs. Created
Blue Ventures works on developing networks of locally managed marine protected areas (LMMAs) in the southwest Indian Ocean, catalyzing coastal conservation by demonstrating the lasting economic benefi
