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Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. Each initiative is an experiment in the use of challenges to focus innovation on making an impact. Individual challenges address some of the same problems, but from differing perspectives.

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Regulation of Gut Health by Phage Infection

Corinne MauriceMcGill UniversityMontreal, Quebec, Canada
Grand Challenges Explorations
Bacteriophage
1 Nov 2015

Corinne Maurice of McGill University in Canada will use an ecological approach to determine whether bacteriophage (phage), which are viruses that infect bacteria, could be used to restore healthy microbial communities in the gut and thereby reduce stunting in children. They will collect stool samples from infants under two years old from Bangladesh, and compare the types of phage and bacteria found in stunted versus healthy children. Phage from healthy children will be used to infect bacteria from stunted children, and vice versa, to analyze how specific phage affect gut microbes under different conditions, which will demonstrate their potential for treating disease.

A Social Media Data-Driven Platform for Informed Data Collection

Grant McKenzieSpatial Development InternationalSeattle, Washington, United States
Grand Challenges Explorations
Financial Services Data
1 Nov 2015

Grant McKenzie of Spatial Development International in the U.S. will map the location of activities (touch points) related to financial services in developing countries by geosocial data mining, analysis and modeling to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of data collection. They will first evaluate whether social media platforms such as Facebook, which include some geographic information, can be used to identify the location of actual touch point locations and from that develop a spatial regression model for estimating distribution in an unmapped, developing country. They will also develop a data collection platform that displays point of interest data for users to supplement with photographs and text, and add any unmapped touch points. In this way, unmapped regions can be easily identified for further exploration. They will evaluate the platform by surveying its performance in a test country.

Network Marketing Mobile Money Acceptance System on m-square

Enoma OdiaSofdia System NigeriaLekki, Nigeria
Grand Challenges Explorations
Mobile Money
1 Nov 2015

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.

Insects Feeding Insects: A Hemolymph-Based Mosquito Diet

Johanna OhmCenter for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Pennsylvania State UniversityUniversity Park, Pennsylvania, United States
Grand Challenges Explorations
Mosquito Control
1 Nov 2015

Johanna Ohm of Pennsylvania State University in the U.S. will produce an insect-based diet for breeding adult malaria-transmitting Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes in the laboratory. Laboratory mosquitoes are most effectively bred for research using mammalian blood meals, which has numerous limitations including higher costs and requiring human volunteers with stringent regulations. It is known that some mosquitoes can produce viable eggs after feeding on soft-bodied insect larvae such as lepidopteran larvae. They will screen a selection of larvae to identify the most palatable insect-based diets, and evaluate them for effect on mosquito survival, fecundity and offspring viability compared to mosquitoes reared on blood-based diets.

Merchants on the Go!

Geraldine O'KeeffeSoftware Group Ke LtdNairobi, Kenya
Grand Challenges Explorations
Mobile Money
1 Nov 2015

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.

Mobile Phone-Based Platform to Improve Financial Inclusion

Rohini PandeHarvard John F. Kennedy School of GovernmentChennai, , India
Grand Challenges Explorations
Financial Services Data
1 Nov 2015

Rohini Pande of Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government in the U.S. and colleagues Simone Schaner, Erica Field, Natalia Rigol, and Charity Troyer-Moore will use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to capture information on the financial access and practices of the rural poor in Madhya Pradesh, India. The system will also enable these people to interact with the formal financial system and receive government benefits. The rural poor in India lack a transparent, verifiable, and easily understood way to access information about account balances and the timing of direct deposit transfers due to poor literacy, and irregular service from bank operators. The IVR system will generate automated voice calls to individuals, providing personalized information on account activity and enabling them to give feedback on banking services through short surveys.

Data Collection Through Interactive Audio Podcasts

Neil PatelAwaazDe Infosystems Pvt LtdAhmedabad, , India
Grand Challenges Explorations
Financial Services Data
1 Nov 2015

Neil Patel of AwaazDe Infosystems Pvt Ltd in India will produce interactive podcasts that are sent by mobile phone to inform local users in India on relevant financial services and to collect their feedback on specific issues in audio form, making it more widely accessible. The feedback will be used to monitor financial habits, and help identify barriers to usage and ways to improve services. The interactive podcast platform can also be supplemented with optional features such as balance inquiries or loan repayment reminders. AwaazDe (“give voice”) will tailor the technology, and work with partners to pilot test the podcasts and collect data first in 10 villages in India, followed by scaling up to 50,000 users.

Use Telecom Data to Identify Digitally Excluded and Women Communities

Frederic PivettaReal Impact AnalyticsLuxembourg, Luxembourg
Grand Challenges Explorations
Financial Services Data
1 Nov 2015

Frederic Pivetta of Real Impact Analytics in Luxembourg will develop a platform and applications to leverage data from telecom operators to identify individuals in developing countries, who are often women, without access to digital financial services. They hypothesize that these isolated individuals display unique cell phone behaviors that they can use to identify them. Once identified, they can be directly targeted with appropriate campaigns and products to encourage them to get beneficial financial services such as mobile money accounts. They will refine a predictive model to identify selected user features such as calling volume and social network characteristics from large datasets.

Ultrasound Strain and Time-of-Flight for Diagnosing Pneumonia

Jonathan RubinUniversity of MichiganAnn Arbor, Michigan, United States
Grand Challenges Explorations
Pneumonia
1 Nov 2015

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.

Pay with a (Group) Selfie (PGS)

Ernesto DamianiKhalifa UniversityAbu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Grand Challenges Explorations
Financial Services Data
1 Nov 2015

Ernesto Damiani of Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates will develop a software toolkit to enable the secure purchase of goods by taking a photo with a simple mobile phone. The procedure only requires both purchaser and merchant to carry a simple phone and to visually identify themselves and details of the purchase, for example with a card, that can be captured in a single photograph. They will build software that uses visual cryptography to divide the photograph into two parts or shares, one sent to each phone. When a network connection is encountered, the shares are transmitted to a third party who runs a point-of-service and reconstructs the image thereby validating the transaction before transferring payment. This method enables transactions between individuals in low network connectivity areas and by illiterate parties.

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