Anna Casalme of Novelly in the U.S. will develop a mobile phone application that combines young adult fiction about social issues with learning tasks and international discussion forums to encourage young people to become global citizens and spark their interest in issues such as gender equality and health. Building on their existing program, they will design and develop the application with specific features, add one novel, and pilot test it, before refining the design and opening it to the public. After three months, they will evaluate their approach by collecting user data such as number of users, their reading progress, and participation in discussion groups.

Eric Dawson of Peace First Inc. in the U.S. will develop a digital platform that provides tools, online mentors, resources, and funding to help young people aged between 13 and 25 in the Middle East solve critical issues in their communities. Their Youth Challenge Platform approach has already shown initial success for over a hundred projects proposed and run by international youth in the U.S. They will adapt their platform for the Middle East by including different languages and tools, particularly to foster cross-cultural collaborations. They will partner with youth organizations in five to 10 Middle Eastern countries and recruit 50 teams of young people who are interested in solving problems related to the UN sustainable development goals. These teams will be supported through the platform to help them design and implement innovative solutions. Surveys and interviews will be used to evaluate the success of their approach in this region.

Lucy Kathuri-Ogola of Kenyatta University in Kenya will train young people to be outreach youth champions to support local smallholder farming households with low food security in Kenya by teaching them new agricultural practices and building financial and social support networks. They will develop a mobile phone application and training platform and test their approach in selected rural and urban areas in Kenya where many smallholder farming families rely heavily on food relief. Sixteen young people who are leaving university will be recruited as outreach youth champions and intensively trained over three weeks on best agricultural practices, and financial and support services such as farmer saving groups. The trained youths will then each go back into their own communities and work with ten households to improve overall social and economic status. They will use surveys to evaluate the effect of their approach on food security.

Romeo Rodriguez of World Possible in the U.S. will use their massive open online courses (MOOC) to provide teachers with advanced practical skills and tools such as inquiry, teamwork, and self-directed learning, to transform teaching and improve student performance in developing countries. The online course also works offline using their low-cost community hotspot. They will implement the courses over twelve months across 15 offline public middle schools in Guatemala and evaluate its impact on teaching methods and whether this can be enhanced by offering additional three-day in-person training. They will also partner with the Ministry of Education and a respected local university to create a digital certification to further motivate teachers to take the course.

Sara-Christine Dallain of iACT in the U.S. will train refugee men and women to become skilled and empowered teachers who deliver early childhood care and education to support the social-emotional, cognitive, and physical development of children in refugee camps. Over 11 million children have been forced to flee their homes, challenging their ability to reach their full potential. Many lack the tools needed to adapt to the uncertainty of their present and future. Their program, Little Ripples, is a refugee-led, culturally-inspired, and cost-effective early childhood education program. It provides training for teachers to incorporate skills of empathy, leadership, teamwork, and creative problem-solving when teaching pupils to create an environment that fosters peace, imagination, and connection-to-culture for refugee children. The curriculum has been developed by experts and is adaptable to different contexts, and the program can be led and expanded to other regions by the teachers themselves. They will implement and test their program in refugee communities in eastern Chad, Cameroon, and Greece to evaluate the impact on refugee children.

Saurabh Agarwal of Deeper Learning Innovations Private Limited in India will build an interactive, digital teaching platform using advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence algorithms to enable teachers across the globe to more effectively teach life skills to every child. Teaching standards in developing countries suffer from limited access to quality content, restricted teaching methods for teachers, and a lack of ways to transfer knowledge and skills to other teachers and parents. Life skills such as problem solving and communication that are needed to address 21^st century challenges such as health, wellness, and gender equality are far better learned by experience and reflection, rather than reading and lectures. They will build the platform and incorporate life skills modules designed by learning experts and teachers containing multi-lingual and contextualized content for global access, a teacher's discussion forum, and a module designed by teachers to help parents support their child's education. The goal is to make the platform freely available and accessible to all teachers across the globe.

Anthony Kolozetti of My School ROCKS in Canada will develop an educational music application for schools that combines collaborative technology with the universal medium of music to help young people succeed academically and acquire 21^st century skills such as mindfulness, stress management, resilience and empathy. Growing numbers of students are suffering from unhappiness at school, experiencing daily anxiety and stress. To address this, they will exploit the synergy between music, education, and mental wellness by creating a platform where students can easily write, record, mix, and share curriculum-based music projects. They will consult with professionals working on neuroplasticity to identify lesson types that have optimal effects on the brain. They will then bring together artists, mental health professionals, technology experts, students, parents, and educators to identify goals and use them to create lesson plans and resources for social emotional learning, song-writing and artistic performance, that can be digitalized in an application. They will also integrate modules that enable students to create their own music-based projects, which can become school-wide performances, without the need for trained music teachers, to showcase songwriting, musicianship, and collaboration. They will pilot test the project over five months in diverse school communities and measure its academic and social impact using surveys and interviews.

Hira Zainab of Knowledge Platform Limited in Pakistan will develop a 'Birds and Bees' program to enable teachers and students from underprivileged schools in Islamabad, Pakistan to design and build bird feeders and bee colonies in order to nurture birds and bees and to market honey. Pakistan is home to over 700 species of birds and fauna that can support substantially increased national honey production. They will recruit pilot schools and work together with the teachers and students to research the local bird species in order to design effective bird feeders. They will also design online and printed material that teaches students about nature and science and how to nurture and attract birds and bees and extract and market honey under a social enterprise brand. They will also produce videos to build a community of nature lovers and problem solvers to help teach others about the program.

Andrew Prentice of the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom will conduct a phase II clinical trial to test the ability of a unique nano iron compound to safely and more effectively treat iron-deficiency anemia in children. Iron-deficiency anemia is a common condition particularly in women and children in resource-poor settings and can be deadly. Current iron supplements have limited effects in these settings and undesirable side effects including increasing the risk of infectious diarrhea in children which causes severe morbidity and mortality. They previously developed a compound iron hydroxide adipate tartrate that acts like dietary iron as it can be directly absorbed in humans keeping it away from any resident intestinal pathogens that also use it as a nutrient source. They will perform an intervention study with 600 iron-deficient anemic children in The Gambia and compare their compound with the current supplement to see if it can normalize iron levels without the side effects.

Thokozani Mwenyekonde from CARE in Malawi is implementing the Umodzi project to promote gender equality for women and girls by engaging adolescent girls and boys, along with supportive adult male and female role models, to integrate gender equitable attitudes and behavior in schools as a basis for changing attitudes nationwide. Umodzi, which means "oneness" in the local Chichewa language, will build upon and adapt existing gender equality approaches including integrating efforts into the school curriculum, training teachers who convene teen club meetings, and working with adults who are also engaged in CARE's pro-women agriculture and savings programs in the school catchment areas.

Michael Tyers of the University of Montreal in Canada will develop a synthetic biology platform to generate vast libraries of natural product-like compounds and use them to identify new drugs for tuberculosis. Traditional drug discovery screens require expensive chemical libraries that are limited in size and scope. Many existing drugs are derived from the natural products of microbes which perform a wide variety of biological functions. This functional diversity is reflected by their structural diversity which is generated by the combinatorial action of hundreds of thousands of different enzymes. They will exploit this natural manufacturing process for the relatively simple and low-cost production of millions to billions of chemically-diverse natural product-like compounds. This will be achieved by expressing different combinations of the enzymes in yeast artificial chromosomes which then allows screening directly in the yeast without the need for costly and time-consuming chemical extraction and purification. Using this approach they will perform a pilot screen to identify new compounds that inhibit the growth of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.