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.

Njayou Ngapagna Arouna of the Université des Montagnes in Cameroon will identify chemical blends to effectively repel tsetse flies, which transmit Human African Trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), as an environmentally friendly method of disease control. Chemical blends released from porous material hung around the necks of cattle in sub-Saharan Africa can protect them from Animal African Trypanosomiasis (nagana), which is also transmitted by tsetse flies. Arouna will initiate a similar approach in humans by optimizing combinations of repellents and testing their ability to repel flies in the laboratory, which will be confirmed in field tests in Central and Western Africa.

Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. will promote the use of flip-flop-style sandals to disrupt the transmission of soil-borne helminths in rural Uganda. Soil-transmitted helminth infections are one of the most common infections worldwide. Their transmission can be disrupted by wearing sandals, but convincing people to wear them has proven challenging. In consultation with the local community, he will design a hologram, which is cheap and mass producible, to stick on the sandals to symbolize the health benefits of wearing them and thereby promote their consistent use. Goldberg will test the ability of the hologram to reduce soil-transmitted helminth infection rates in selected households in Western Uganda.

James Tibenderana and colleagues of the Malaria Consortium in the United Kingdom are adapting a "community dialogue" approach to build trust between communities and the health system in Mozambique in order to boost participation in Mass Drug Administration (MDA) programs against neglected tropical diseases. Low participation in MDA programs is thought to be caused by negative local perceptions of these diseases and a limited understanding of the goals of MDAs. By engaging with communities to address their misconceptions and fill knowledge gaps, they aim to align the goals of the community with those of MDAs to improve participation. In Phase I, Sylvia Meek performed a pilot study focused on schistosomiasis and trained 157 community members in four, resource-poor districts of the Nampula province to act as dialogue facilitators. They developed materials such as flip charts for the facilitators to inform individuals, including those who are illiterate, during organized sessions about the causes, symptoms, prevention, and control of schistosomiasis. Their study increased awareness and knowledge, and willingness to participate in MDAs, and also mobilized communities to implement preventative measures such as building latrines. In Phase II, James Tibenderana and colleagues will adapt their approach to maximize its impact and address the challenges identified in Phase I. Two additional diseases will be included, and they will train more facilitators. The refined approach will then be tested over a longer period in the same region as Phase I, and involve more extensive evaluation to ultimately test its impact on MDA participation.

Gisli Olafsson of NetHope Inc. in the U.S. will work to improve humanitarian information management to better inform decision-making in emergency situations, such as after a natural disaster. In a crisis situation, information on what is needed and what is being done comes from different humanitarian organizations, but these data often do not conform to universal standards or are not made generally available. She will consult experts from the private sector and incorporate best practices from different existing data standards efforts. This information will be used to develop a cloud-based interoperability platform that enables information to flow among different systems and be easily accessed by decision makers.

H.V. Jagadish of the University of Michigan in the U.S. will take disparate datasets on diverse topics, including education, health, and the environment, which are often reported using different geographical units such as Zip Code or County, and realign them to a common unit so they can be better compared and used. Jagadish will develop four general techniques for aligning data partitions and apply them to existing datasets in one state in the U.S. so that they can be viewed according to different geographical units. Jagadish will also produce an interface so that policy analysts and NGOs can easily access and query these data, and collect feedback to improve the approach.

Mohammad Riaz Khan from Charles Sturt University in Australia will test whether the controlled internal release of progesterone in Pakistani dairy buffaloes can induce pregnancy and thereby increase milk production. Buffaloes are an important source of milk in Pakistan, but they breed seasonally and have a silent ovulation. This translates to a long interval (over 500 days) between calves, which limits milk production. He will test a controlled internal drug-release device over different time periods on animals from small rural farms in Pakistan to determine if it can induce pregnancy to reduce the long calving interval.

Paul Dyson of Swansea University in the United Kingdom will work to control the incidence of sleeping sickness in humans, which is caused by the Trypanosome parasite transmitted by tsetse flies, by genetically modifying a fly gut bacterium to deliver double-stranded (ds) RNAs to block two important parasite proteins. Trypanosomes mature in the flies, thereby gaining the capacity to infect mammals. He will engineer the bacteria and introduce them into tsetse flies, then test the capacity of the dsRNAs to inhibit their target proteins in trypanosomes. This approach could lead to long-term control of this disease as the bacteria are maternally transmitted to the offspring.

Michael Kane and colleagues from Yale University in the U.S. will create document clustering software incorporated into a web interface to enable clinical researchers to better search through the published literature on both human and veterinary medicine, to promote new discoveries for treating disease. Online biomedical literature and genetics databases carry large amounts of information on animal and human health. However, these two specialities diverge in the ways they are documented, making comparisons across species difficult with current online search engines, even in the context of a single disease such as Rift Valley fever, which infects both humans and animals. They will apply statistics and machine learning methods to enable large quantities of diverse data streams from the human and animal medical fields to be searched, thereby promoting new research directions for Rift Valley fever and other diseases.

Samuel Okurut and a team from the National Agricultural Research Organization in Uganda will develop a simple low-cost tool for women smallholder farmers to more easily and efficiently harvest cassava, which is a major staple food in the developing world. The classical, manual method for harvesting cassava is labor and cost intensive, involving hoeing and digging in a bent posture. The new tool will be developed with input from women farmers and key stakeholders, and designed to be operated in a more upright posture. The cost-benefit of the tool will be tested in the field, and the feasibility of training and local fabrication will be explored.

Andrew Jackson of the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom will develop a diagnostic tool for Animal African Trypanosomiasis (Nagana), which is caused by unicellular parasites known as trypanosomes and threatens up to 50 million cattle in sub-Saharan countries. To avoid immune detection, the causative trypanosomes change their DNA sequences (genomes), particularly in genes encoding for cell surface glycoproteins, which also affects the symptoms the parasites cause. They will sequence these trypanosome genes from forty parasites spanning diverse countries and hosts to quantify their variation. By associating the variation with disease factors, such as virulence and severity, this profile of variation can be developed as a diagnostic marker to improve disease management and treatment.

Lakshminarayanan Ragupathy of HLL Lifecare Ltd. in India will improve the safety and appeal of male condoms by incorporating graphene into existing natural rubber latex condoms. Graphene is a single-layer, crystalline form of carbon that is highly elastic and very strong. And, unlike latex, it also conducts heat. Mixing graphene with existing condom material should lead to stronger, thinner, heat-conducting condoms that are less noticeable for users, and allow for the incorporation of drugs and compounds that can protect against sexually transmitted diseases or enhance sexual experience. In Phase I, they used a planetary ball milling approach to produce graphene from graphite, incorporated it into natural rubber latex, and used that to produce condoms. Compared to traditional latex condoms, they found that their graphene condoms were over 20% stronger, conducted over 30% more heat, and were as safe to use. In Phase II, they will test the feasibility of scaling up production, and perform more detailed quality control tests as well as a human preclinical trial to evaluate whether graphene condoms are more pleasurable to use and are as safe and effective as traditional latex condoms.

Nils Pilotte and Steven Williams of Smith College in the U.S. along with Lisa Reimer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom are developing a simple and inexpensive approach to monitor diseases caused by parasites that thrive in mosquitos based on detection in mosquito feces. Current approaches for disease surveillance are expensive, insensitive, or labor intensive, and are generally unsuitable for the areas in which they are needed most, including where disease incidence has decreased. This proposed so-called molecular xenomonitoring approach overcomes these hurdles, in part by avoiding the need for human sampling, and because it can be adapted to increase throughput. In Phase I, they demonstrated proof-of-principle that very low levels of parasitic DNA could indeed be extracted from mosquito fecal samples and then detected by PCR, and also adapted a simple test-strip detection method that could be used in low-resource field settings. They also developed a mosquito trap from a two-liter soda bottle containing a simple carbon dioxide-producing solution and sugar, and demonstrated its ability to attract mosquitos and isolate their feces in a field setting in Trinidad, albeit with modest yields. In Phase II, they will further optimize their detection method and the traps, and perform preliminary field tests in malarial and filarial endemic locations in the Philippines, Ghana, and Haiti.

Milosz Faber of Thomas Jefferson University in the U.S. will develop a combined contraceptive rabies vaccine that both protects dogs against rabies and reduces their population levels in order to control the incidence of human rabies. Human rabies causes 70,000 deaths annually and is mostly spread by dogs. Current therapeutic approaches to control dog rabies require multiple doses and have had limited success. Faber has designed a safe dog rabies variant that can induce a strong and long-lasting immune response when introduced in mice. He will combine this vaccine with gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), which causes infertility. Three different carrier proteins will be conjugated to GnRH and tested in combination with the vaccine for safety and for inducing immune responses upon a single dose in mice.

Jinlin Zhou of the Shanghai Veterinary Research Institute in China will develop anti-tick biological agents composed of double-stranded (ds) RNAs targeting two selected tick proteins to control the dominant tick species Rhiphicephalus haemaphysaloides, which causes human and animal diseases in south Asian countries. Previous control approaches using pesticides or vaccines have had limited success. Long dsRNAs, which silence target genes, have previously been used successfully to control a tick infestation in cattle. Zhou has selected two candidate proteins in R. haemaphysaloides, P0, which is required for viability, and Rhipilin-1, which is required for the tick to attach to the host. Zhou will synthesize dsRNAs against these proteins and test different liposome types and conditions for optimal delivery into the ticks, and evaluate the effect of the dsRNAs on tick survival and feeding.

Mumbi Kimathi and a team from Farm Concern International in Kenya will promote farming-related trade between and around villages in rural Africa with their "e-Women Dial-up Initiative." They will develop a mobile phone platform for communications, and for ordering and paying for farming-related materials, products, and services. They will test their approach in 10 villages in Kenya, consisting of 5,000 farmers, and establish a rural distribution network by recruiting vehicle owners to reduce the need for individuals to be mobile. They will also set up a supply network of accredited materials, services, and business development service providers. Their approach will be evaluated in terms of volumes traded, income, cost- and time-savings, and the level of individual participation.

Geraldine Taylor and colleagues at The Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom will develop a thermo-tolerant vaccine based on human adenovirus 5 (Ad5) against peste des petits ruminants (PPR), a highly contagious disease found in goats and sheep, that enables the distinction between infected and vaccinated animals (known as DIVA vaccines). Current live attenuated vaccines require cold storage, which is unavailable in many developing countries, and vaccinated animals cannot be differentiated from infected animals, complicating disease control efforts. Ad5–vectored vaccines are safe and effective in humans, inducing both antibody and cytotoxic T cell responses from the immune system. They will extend their preliminary work showing that Ad5-conjugated with surface glycoproteins from the PPR virus provides complete protection in goats by vaccinating local breeds of goats in Africa. They will also determine the minimum vaccine dose and the effect of adding a specific cytokine to enhance immunity.

Edward Mitre and colleagues at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine in the U.S. will develop a short course therapy for clearing adult filarial worms, which cause substantial morbidity and mortality, to enhance eradication efforts. Current antifilarial medications target only larval forms of the worms, requiring repeated administration until the natural death of the adults. Filarial infections are known to induce immune cells to release histamine, which can regulate the immune response. Using mouse models of filarial infections, they will evaluate whether a short course of standard antifilarial treatment combined with an antihistamine can clear adult worms and thereby more quickly cure the disease.

Ali Mokdad and a team at the University of Washington in the U.S. will integrate data on animal health and its determinants to better understand and monitor human health and opportunity in the developing world. Animal health, which itself is influenced by environmental factors, has a direct impact on human health. Although data on all these areas exist, there has been no attempt to amalgamate them to measure the overall impact on human health. They will assess data from Zambia on environmental factors such as temperature and rainfall, and the condition and sales of animals and crops, to identify indicators of animal health. These will be integrated with data on human disease burden and mortality to generate an enhanced human health metric that incorporates the effects of animal health. They will also make recommendations for improved data collection.

Benjamin Strutt and a team from Cambridge Design Partnership in the United Kingdom will design a male condom made from a composite anisotropic material that will provide universal fit and is designed to gently tighten during intercourse, enhancing sensation and reliability. New designs will be created and tested for specific functional and performance parameters that they will identify by consulting with users. They will also develop a manufacturing process and build prototypes that will be tested for feel, fit, performance, and manufacturability.

Kelly Johnston and others from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom will develop a cell line from a parasitic filarial nematode worm that can proliferate continuously in vitro to enable high-throughput screening of candidate anti-filarial drugs. Current drug screening efforts are limited by the complex life cycle of the worms and the difficulties of obtaining sufficient numbers of worms. They will isolate worm cells from various life cycle stages and use a high-content screening approach to monitor thousands of cells cultured under different conditions to increase the probability of detecting a stably growing cell line. Once one or more stable cell lines have been produced, they will establish optimal culture conditions for drug screening assays.

Eileen Devaney and Elmarie Myburgh of the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom will determine whether parasitic filarial worms can be visualized in the lymphatic system of live animals as a means to measure drug activity. Testing candidate anti-filarial drugs using in vivo models is preferable to the current in vitro assays because the selected drugs are more likely to be effective in humans. They will infect mice with either larval or adult stage parasites, and then inject them with bioluminescent substrates of specific immune cells. This should enable them to image the host inflammatory response to the infection, track the parasites within the lymphatic system, and determine the parasites' longevity. Probes to directly detect excretory-secretory products in live adult parasites will also be developed. This approach will ultimately be used for in vivo drug screens.

Jimmy Mays of the University of Tennessee in the U.S. will develop a prototype male condom made from superelastomers (a highly elastic polymer). This will enable the manufacture of thinner and softer condoms that will enhance user experience. It will also simplify the condom manufacturing process and make it less expensive.

Tim Day and Mostafa Zamanian of Iowa State University in the U.S. will evaluate a new approach for treating parasitic worm infections based on blocking parasite microRNAs. Parasitic worms (helminths), such as Schistosoma, release small vesicles called exosomes containing microRNAs, which are thought to target host genes and aid infectivity. They will test this directly using a mouse model of schistosome infection by identifying the relevant microRNAs, designing anti-microRNAs to block them, and determining if the mice can be made resistant to infection. This approach could be expanded to other parasitic worm infections and ultimately used to develop an effective human therapeutic.

Mark McGlothlin of Apex Medical Technologies, Inc. in the U.S. will produce a male condom with enhanced strength and sensitivity using collagen fibrils from bovine tendons, which are widely available from meat processing. Collagen fibrils would provide a hydrated micro-rough skin-like surface texture that facilitates heat transfer to produce a more natural sensation. They will develop methods to best arrange the fibrils and more safely crosslink them. Barrier properties of the engineered condom will be quantified, enhanced if necessary, and sensitivity will be tested.

James Pimundu and team from Send a Cow Rwanda in Rwanda will test whether educating men and women in Rwanda on gender barriers and social behavior issues stimulates them to use energy-saving stoves for cooking. Although affordable energy-saving stoves are available, they are not widely adopted, possibly because women have limited access to money and lack the power to make decisions. They will train both men and women to inform them of gender barriers in order to reduce inequality. By promoting better technology uptake in this way they aim to substantially reduce the time and labor costs of collecting firewood, as well as empowering the women to take control of other important family issues such as health and child care.

Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu of the Smallholders Foundation in Nigeria will improve his Box-in-a-Truck design for extending the lifespan of cassava, which is a major staple food grown by women smallholder farmers, to decrease labor costs associated with cassava processing. Cassava spoils within 24 hours of harvesting, and the traditional method of prolonging life by leaving the crops longer in the ground reduces the nutritional content. He has designed a small, manually transportable truck containing a wire box that is surrounded by moist sawdust and can hold 145 pieces of cassava. This Box in a Truck is inexpensive and can be locally manufactured and maintained. Initial tests showed that cassava stored in this way lasted the duration of the 16 day study period and retained more nutrients than when it is left in the ground. He will test extended time spans and optimize parameters for use, and then field-test the device for its capacity to save labor and its suitability for local conditions across different seasons using 200 women smallholder farmers.

Donna Cohn and colleagues from Hampshire College in the U.S. will develop a cheap and simple threshing machine to more easily and carefully process pearl millet, which is a highly nutritious staple cereal grown in sub-Saharan Africa. To extract the edible grains, pearl millet is currently processed by hand, which is labor-intensive and highly inefficient, causing substantial reductions in yield. They will refine their thresher design, including producing variations for powering it, and field-test prototypes in Ghana for performance. This will drive further refinements to generate a final design, for which production costs will be determined.

Sara Delaney of Episcopal Relief & Development in the U.S. and Ghanaian colleagues will promote the use of donkeys with ploughs for draught power to decrease labor and increase productivity of women smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Traditionally, oxen are used as draught animals but they are often unavailable to women due to cost, gender and cultural issues, and their large size makes them difficult for women to handle. The donkey ploughs are suitable for weeding and preparing land for a variety of crops, and can be locally manufactured and maintained. The Ghanaian team will run training workshops in northern Ghana for women smallholder farmers currently using hand tools, and provide two affordable financing options for them to purchase the donkey, plough, and cart. Performance, financial aspects, and the level of adoption will then be evaluated.

Jeffrey Stringer of the University of North Carolina Global Women’s Health group in the U.S. will oversee a team of Zambian and U.S. researchers in a prospective cohort study of 2,000 pregnant women over a three-year period in Lusaka, Zambia. The study will assess gestational age by early ultrasound and collect data and specimens throughout pregnancy and at delivery with standardized systems to document complications of pregnancy and assessment of birth outcomes. Data and specimens will be used to evaluate the causes of preterm birth and investigate novel strategies for prevention.

David Eschenbach and his team from the University of Washington in the U.S. will determine the effect of disturbances in the vaginal microbiome on preterm birth. Their research will investigate how specific vaginal bacterial infections and changes in the female reproductive tract are associated with preterm birth. The long-term goal is to identify new ways for early identification and treatment of women at risk of preterm birth and develop a point-of-care diagnostic test appropriate for low-resource settings, which would function much like a home pregnancy test, indicating an elevated risk of premature birth.

Stephen Oliver and Elizabeth Bilsland at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom will develop a yeast-based screen to identify compounds inhibiting selected enzymes from parasitic filarial worms, which cause several common and debilitating diseases. Candidate enzymes as potential antifilarial drug targets will be selected based on their importance specifically in the adult stages of the parasite life cycle, against which current drugs are ineffective. Yeast strains will be modified to produce these candidate enzymes and used in medium-throughput screens with the freely-available Malaria Box of compounds, which are active against the malaria parasite. This approach is cheaper and easier than current screening methods, and should identify compounds that are highly specific for adult filarial worms.

Aaron Maule of Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom will develop food crops expressing microRNAs that, upon ingestion by humans, can be used to target and kill parasitic worms and the mosquitos that transmit them. Plant microRNAs can survive the digestion process and are detected in human blood following consumption. Therefore, they may also be encountered by blood-borne parasitic worms and by the blood-eating insects that transmit them, which cause widespread disease. He will select candidate microRNAs and test their activity using rodent infection models. The most effective microRNAs will be tested for toxicity to human cells, and will be used to engineer transgenic plants to analyze efficacy upon ingestion in rodents.

Edward Mitre and his team at the Uniformed Services University in the U.S. will develop a method for the long-term maintenance of parasitic Roundworms (filariae) in cell-free culture. Human filariae cause substantial morbidity worldwide, but current therapies are inefficient or cause harmful side effects. Additionally, the inability to maintain filariae in vitro has hampered screening efforts to identify new drugs. They will determine whether factors secreted by human endothelial cells can prolong the in vitro cell-free survival specifically of adult filariae, which are resistant to some treatments and therefore attractive targets for new therapies.

Paul McVeigh from Queen's University of Belfast in the United Kingdom will develop a diagnostic for filarial infections, which are caused by parasitic nematodes (roundworms) and can cause severe pain and disability. He will screen serum samples from filariasis patients to identify circulating microRNAs associated with the presence specifically of adult parasitic nematodes (macrofilariae) as candidate diagnostic biomarkers. As macrofilariae commonly evade existing diagnostics and are resistant to some treatments, this approach could substantially improve elimination efforts of this highly prevalent disease.

Gregory Goldgof, Elizabeth Winzeler and colleagues from the University of California, San Diego in the U.S. have developed a drug-sensitive yeast strain by deleting the main multi-drug export pumps to help identify the mechanisms of action of the 400 next-generation anti-malarial drug candidates in the Malaria Box. This will help optimize drug safety and efficacy for clinical trials. In Phase I, they successfully screened the Malaria Box compounds and identified 30 that were active in their assay. They also performed directed evolution studies by exposing the yeast to increasing sublethal concentrations of 21 of the active compounds. Resistant yeast clones were then sequenced to identify the likely molecular targets. In Phase II, they will exploit the same yeast strain to identify targets for compounds with activity specifically against either the liver stage of the malaria parasite, which could be used to cure infected patients, or the gametocyte stage, which could reduce the rate of malaria transmission. Their approach is particularly valuable for these types of compounds as they cannot be used for directed evolution studies in the malaria parasites themselves.

Caroline Diehl of Media Trust in the United Kingdom and her team will combine its existing television channel with media partnerships and creative young people to produce the first television, online and mobile channel run by young people to disseminate stories on development. A pilot model has been locally tested using established infrastructure and partnerships. They will form global partnerships for distribution, recruit managers, and build a small team of young reporters and filmmakers from the UK and one or more developing countries, and provide them with a unique platform to create, present, and distribute stories on local and global development.

Ockie Bosch and his team at the University of Adelaide in Australia will create a virtual Evolutionary Learning Laboratory (ELLab) to identify sustainable labor-saving innovations in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The ELLab is a systems approach designed to incorporate thinking from all relevant groups, such as the farmers, policy makers, and tool developers, in order to define useful, practical, and broadly applicable solutions. They will conduct interviews and run workshops to promote a shared understanding of the needs and viewpoints on labor-saving strategies of the different groups, and build their capacity for thinking more holistically. Proposed solutions, such as new tools, strategies, and policies will undergo a cyclical process of discussions and problem solving, leading to the evolution of more effective labor-saving solutions.

Alice Irene Whittaker-Cumming and Veronica Kette of Mother Nature Partnership and the African Women Education and Development Forum in the U.S. will provide innovative reusable menstrual cups and related education to women smallholder farmers. Current cultural taboos inhibit women from farming while menstruating, substantially reducing productivity. Building on a successful pilot project, they will scale-up testing to 5,000 women smallholder farmers in rural Cameroon to evaluate the impact on productivity and behavior. Local health professionals will be recruited to support the project, and educational workshops will be hosted for participants. Radio will also be used to enhance awareness.

Jason Andrews and colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S. have developed a low-cost handheld device that allows rapid and quantitative detection of Loa loa helminthic parasites in the bloodstream by fluorescent photometry. Quantitative detection is important because individuals with high levels of Loa loa can be fatally sensitive to a widely administered drug used to treat another common parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulans. Conventional detection by microscopy is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and often impractical in the field. They will calibrate the device, and then conduct a pilot study at an established field site.

Stephen Sowerby of the University of Otago in New Zealand has developed a quantitative cell-phone-based diagnostic and will test its ability to detect and monitor soil-transmitted helminth infections (intestinal worms), which are the most common infections worldwide. Quantitative monitoring of infection is crucial for evaluating therapeutic agents to combat the increase in drug resistant parasites. The approach simplifies current diagnostic methods by processing stool samples so that they can be digitally imaged and transmitted via cell phone for remote diagnosis, and is therefore likely to be cheaper and more accessible to developing countries.

Seshie Ahedor of Vivus Ltd. in Ghana will establish an infrastructure to provide cargo motorbikes to rural women farmers for labor-enduring activities such as the collection of crops, and to enable access to remote markets for selling produce. They will set-up mobility collection centers for provision and maintenance, and test on-demand pay-as-you-go versus group-ownership financing models in several villages. Once the most effective financing model has been identified, they aim to build a network of collection centers to provide affordable mobility options for smallholder farms nationwide.

Michelle Winthrop of Farm Africa (Food & Agricultural Research Management) in the United Kingdom will lead a team of community development experts to support 300 women farmers in Ethiopia to access and use existing technologies such as weeders and seed drills that substantially reduce the labor intensity of growing maize and sorghum. There are many cultural and social barriers that have prevented widespread adoption of new technologies in these settings, particularly for women. To overcome these barriers, they will use a holistic approach, educating communities and local government to promote cultural and social acceptance of the technologies. They will also work with the women's groups to support trial, use and financing, and with local small-medium enterprises for manufacturing and maintenance.

Andrew Steckl and Giovanni Pauletti of the University of Cincinnati in the U.S. will develop a paper-based urine test for the rapid non-invasive detection of the filarial Roundworm Loa loa, which causes the painful skin and eye disease loaisis, commonly found in western and central Africa. Current diagnostic approaches are invasive, involving visual detection of larvae in tissue or blood samples. The approach here utilizes the potential effect of parasite-released hormones found in the urine of infected individuals on the viscosity of animal blood spotted onto filter paper. The diagnostic test will be easy to perform and is projected to be inexpensive to manufacture.