Enoma Odia of Sofdia System Nigeria in Nigeria will apply network marketing to promote the uptake of mobile money by offering financial rewards to merchants for recommending it to other merchants within their community. This marketing system leverages the communal style of living, where the residing merchants sell similar products and share the same language. When a recommendation to use mobile money comes from a merchant in the same community, and the rewards for referrals are shared between users, it is more likely to be accepted. They will use their m-square platform, evaluate the most effective compensation levels to promote uptake, and add an accounting system for users to monitor their income.

Geraldine O’Keeffe of Software Group KE Ltd. in Kenya will develop a smartphone application so that smaller merchants in developing economies can use one system to receive mobile money from customers with different providers, and can digitally track sales and inventory. They will also explore options for subsidizing the technology including offering the generated data to financial service providers and others. Their approach will allow merchants to easily register online to encourage uptake, also reducing recruitment costs. They will customize their mobile application for the Kenyan market, integrate it with existing payment service providers, and perform a pilot study over 3-4 months with 25-50 merchants to evaluate functionality and usage for refining the platform.

Jonathan Rubin of the University of Michigan in the U.S. will develop a simple, low-cost ultrasound device with cell phone display that can diagnose children with co-existing pneumonia and malnutrition. Over two million children per year die from pneumonia, and many of these deaths are caused by coexisting malnutrition. They will design an ultrasound stethoscope device to automatically measure lung expansion and contraction during breathing to detect ventilation problems caused by pneumonia as well as the levels of subcutaneous fat on the chest wall to detect malnutrition. The device will be tailored for use by a minimally-trained health worker and the results reported on the display by a numeric readout. They will test the adapted ultrasound device in the laboratory, and gather population data to determine the normal distribution of fat thickness in the chest wall for estimating nutritional status.

Punit Shah of OkHi in Kenya will build a platform to provide up-to-date information on financial access endpoints such as ATM locations by crowdsourcing data from smartphones from a network of users. Current tech-based data collection tools are not ideal as they are generally expensive, and the data quickly become outdated. They will build an app and run a 6-month pilot test by providing locked smart phones with limited functions to potential data collectors in Nairobi, one smaller city and one rural location. As data collectors complete set collection missions using their phones, more functions will be unlocked until the user becomes the owner of the phone, whereby subsequent missions are rewarded with free airtime. The data will be analyzed to determine the frequency of updates, and integrated with open data platforms to broadly disseminate the information and enhance its value.