Christine Yee with Darpan Bohara and Yashna Sureka of Smith College in the U.S. will develop a fingerprint scanner that can link to phone networks and banks to enable merchants to easily and quickly accept mobile money payments in India. Fingerprint identification is relatively secure and will simplify the payment process so people with different levels of literacy can use it. They will test their prototype by giving deposits to a group of students and scanners to local merchants in Nelamangala, India, and providing the associated knowledge and resources needed to use their mobile money transfer system.

Mirko Zimic of Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Peru will develop a simple, low-cost lung ultrasound device that can automatically diagnose bacterial pneumonia and measure nutritional status in children in low-resource settings. They have developed an algorithm to detect lung infiltrates from digital ultrasound images as evidence of pneumonia in children, and have built a prototype device, which comprises an ultrasound probe connected to a laptop or smartphone for realtime analysis of the images. Visible and audio alerts are used to notify the technician of suspect regions. They will develop an additional algorithm to automatically measure anatomical parameters including rib diameter and skin thickness for predicting levels of malnutrition, and test it in a hospital in Peru. Ultimately, this will be incorporated into the ultrasound device so that both pneumonia and malnutrition can be easily diagnosed together by non-specialized health care workers.

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.

Kathleen Colson of The BOMA Project, Inc. in Kenya will investigate, measure and document how participation in BOMA’s Rural Entrepreneur Access Project (REAP)—a holistic two-year program of sequenced interventions—translates to such gender-influenced outcomes as increased household financial decision-making by women, increased education opportunities for girls and increased food security and use of healthcare by the household. REAP is a high-impact poverty graduation program that addresses the geographic and socio-economic context of the arid and semi-arid lands of Africa, where the harsh effects of climate change and endemic extreme poverty persistently undermine the well-being of women and children. The project provides ultra-poor Kenyan women cash grants, business skills training, mentoring and the opportunity to set up their own business to help lift their families out of poverty. Giving women more power over household spending tends to lead to improved family health care and education. They will recruit 750 women living in extreme poverty in pastoral communities to their two-year poverty graduation program. Upon these women exiting REAP, they will analyze its impact on improving the education and social standing of women and girls, and the physical and financial wellbeing of their families.