Brian Lilly of Ergo-Tech Inc. in the U.S. will design and build a water irrigation pump from inexpensive and widely available automobile parts to decrease labor and increase production of women smallholder farmers in Africa. Irrigation is one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive activities of women farmers. Making an irrigation system from automobile parts is useful because the parts are well tested and mass-produced in Africa, and expertise on their repair and maintenance is readily available. Lilly will build an irrigation system from automobile parts using different designs for the pump and battery charger components, and test the interchangeability of different parts. Once the design is finalized, he will build 10 machines and test them in Africa to evaluate performance.

Matthew Bonds of Harvard University in the U.S. will quantify the economic burden of disease using a combined metric to incorporate disease impact on both human and animal health. Current measures of economic burden consider humans and animals independently, yet they are both influenced by disease and by the health of each other. They will develop an integrated model combining epidemiology and economic growth to uncover links between disease impact and income in both human and livestock systems. Their model will be tested in the field using target human and wildlife populations in Madagascar to quantify the overall economic burden of disease.

Patrick Kiser of Northwestern University in the U.S. proposes to synthesize new polymeric materials that mimic the properties of mucosal tissue and to use these materials in the development and manufacture of condoms. These technologies could improve sensation and the condoms would be readily manufacturable for deployment across the globe.

Pushpa Singh of the Civil Society Information Services India in India will develop a common repository to receive, validate, and store information from multiple sources on not-for-profit organizations to make it easier to access support from philanthropic intermediaries. Philanthropic intermediaries currently perform independent searches to find appropriate NGO partners to support, which costs time, money, and effort. The relevant data generated during these searches would benefit others, but it is often wasted, made inaccessible, or in a form that makes it incompatible with similar datasets. To address this, Singh will build a validated, searchable, and up-to-date NGO information source. Using test partners, Singh will design and develop the architecture for the system, which includes a tool that can transform diverse types of data into a standard format and vice-versa, and an tool for importing and export data.

George Warimwe of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom will develop a vaccine to protect a variety of species, including humans, sheep and cattle, against Rift Valley fever, which can cause serious illness. Current vaccines that are in development have safety concerns for use in humans. They have developed a Rift Valley fever vaccine using a replication-deficient simian adenovirus as a safe vector that is easy and inexpensive to manufacture, and have tested its safety and immunogenicity in mice, and begun field-testing in sheep in Kenya. They will test safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine and the effect of an adjuvant in calves and goats, and compare this with the data from mice and sheep.

Peter Rabinowitz of the University of Washington in the U.S., along with colleagues at Washington State University and CDC Kenya, will test whether unhealthy gut microbes in livestock that co-reside with humans in smallholder households can negatively influence the gut microbes in the humans, and whether this can be exploited to improve human health. The microbial community (microbiota) living in the gut is important for childhood health, growth and development. They will analyze the gut microbiotas of healthy and unhealthy children and co-residing companion and domestic animals in selected households in western Kenya to determine whether they are related. If they are, they will reset the animal microbiota using established fecal transplant methods and determine whether there is a corresponding positive effect on the microbiotas of the rest of the household.

Simon Parrish of Development Initiatives in the United Kingdom will create a toolkit for the generation of a single interoperable dataset from diverse databases to help more users better assess the impact of resource spending in developing countries. Accurately assessing the impact of spending in areas such as health and education in specific locations, and the ability to directly compare different locations, is necessary to effectively eradicate poverty. However, the relevant datasets are currently incompatible or difficult to access by the appropriate communities. Parrish will partner with a Ugandan organization and community leaders in two districts to identify relevant datasets and the pertinent information they contain. This will be used to generate a merged dataset along with a web-based tool for local users, which will then be evaluated for interoperability and usability.

Derek Dunn-Rankin of the University of California, Irvine in the U.S. will refine the design of an energy storage device that collects and stores solar energy to enable indoor or evening cooking in developing countries. Traditional stoves use wood or animal dung as an energy source, which are labor-intensive methods, environmentally unfriendly, and potentially deleterious to health. The storage device consists of an insulated box containing potassium nitrite and sodium nitrite, which undergo a solid-to-liquid phase transition at a certain temperature. During re-solidification, the stored energy is slowly released to provide a stable heat source that can be used to cook foods such as bread and rice. They will work to optimize the design to improve performance and reduce the cost of the device, in order to move towards mass production.

Mustafa Ojonuba Jibrin from Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria will produce a participatory reality TV show to promote the use of draught animals to help female farmers in Nigeria with ploughing, ridging, and weeding. Female farmers are far less likely to use draught animals for farming as they have less access than male farmers, and lack skills and confidence, and it is considered culturally unacceptable for women to use them. As television and social media are widely available in Nigeria, he will develop a reality show using male and female participants with incentives to encourage public voting and thereby viewing, to promote female use of draught animals and increase cultural acceptance of the practice.

Rachel Hess of the Mennonite Economic Development Associates in the U.S. will work in Ghana to test different models of water catchment and storage and irrigation systems to promote dry season cultivation in small farms in the north part of the country. Food production by women farmers in Ghana's northern savannah region is restricted to a single season of rainfall and is not sufficient to circumvent malnutrition. Low-cost water storage systems are available, but need to be brought to these rural areas and adapted to their needs and capabilities. They will recruit users to evaluate four models for ease of assembly and use, and select at least two to evaluate performance in 15-20 households, and do cost-benefit analyses.

Michael Rutner and Russell Burley of House of Petite Pty. Ltd. in Australia will build and test a universal condom applicator pack (CAP), which is designed to ensure that male condoms can be quickly, accurately, safely and easily fitted. Condoms are currently mostly applied manually, which can increase the risk of disease transmission or unplanned pregnancy due to damage to the condom during fitting or incorrect positioning, for example. The CAP and condom will be provided in the same packaging, and the mechanism is designed to ensure correct positioning and avoid damage. They will review materials for the CAP and build prototypes to be tested in the lab and in trials, as well as performing preliminary production and marketing.

Daniel Rock of the University of Illinois in the U.S. will develop a multivalent vector vaccine from the ubiquitous Orf virus that can protect ruminants from multiple diseases with a single dose. Current vaccines for a variety of animal diseases that cause substantial economic costs in the developing world are expensive and require multiple doses. The Orf virus has a wide host range, induces robust and long-lasting antiviral immunity, and can be extensively modified to express antigens from a variety of viruses. It can also pass to non-vaccinated animals providing an inexpensive and easy way of protecting large numbers of animals. Rock will begin by constructing an Orf-based vaccine using known antigens of the peste des petits ruminants virus and assay its efficacy in goats or sheep, its long-term persistence, and its ability to transfer to and protect unvaccinated animals.