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.

Lazar Mathew and team are working on a smart pill box that tracks exactly the time through radio frequency identification (RFID) of the dose coupled with SMS trigger systems. The pill box can dispense blister packs rather than tablets, and incorporates a timer which can only be programmed by the medicine provider. Medication cannot be taken out before or after certain times, preventing double dosage. SMS reminders will be sent to family members as well. Monitoring of up to 90 dosages will be possible with a table-top dispenser.

William Kisaalita of the University of Georgia in the U.S. will redesign a milk churner to make it suitable for women in order to reduce the time and labor needed to make ghee. In many sub-Saharan countries, the morning milk harvested from cattle can be sold in markets, but the milk harvested in the evening needs to be processed into longer-lasting products such as ghee to prevent it from perishing. The current method for churning milk to make ghee is time and labor intensive. He will recruit women in Uganda to test and refine the milk churner design, which is cheap and can be locally manufactured and repaired, to make it more ergonomic and culturally appropriate for women users and thereby promote its widespread adoption.

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.