Fatema Khatun of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh in Bangladesh will develop a digital intervention to enable sharing of existing digital health data between community health workers and provide them with feedback indicators along with tailored messaging to parents to improve timeliness and coverage of vaccination against tuberculosis in rural Bangladesh. Tuberculosis is the number one cause of death by infectious disease worldwide, and 95% of deaths occur in developing countries. In Bangladesh, the bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine against childhood tuberculosis is usually administered at six weeks of age, despite the fact that vaccination at birth could decrease mortality by three percent – a significant number of cases in this tuberculosis-endemic country. Immediate vaccination is especially important for high risk neonates including low-birth-weight babies and those born to hepatitis B-positive mothers. The digital intervention strategy will be developed to combine the existing electronic health record system with the pregnancy and childbirth registry and to provide digital communication between the community workers providing prenatal and delivery care and those providing BCG vaccination. This will ensure that newborns at increased risk for tuberculosis are prioritized for immediate vaccination. The system will also send direct messages to mothers before and after birth, reminding them of the importance of timely vaccination. Their approach uses existing data in a new way to improve overall vaccination rate and timeliness and decrease infant mortality.

Eric Kaduru of KadAfrica Estate Limited and John Onekalit of the Kitgum Concerned Women's Association both in Uganda will provide a 12-month, integrated life skills and agricultural training program along with land and seedlings to young refugee women out of school in Uganda to begin their own sustainable passion fruit farming cooperatives. Uganda has accepted many refugees, but also has the world's youngest population and very high unemployment. As a result, particularly girls have very limited employment opportunities if they even manage to finish school, and instead often work in the sex industry or immediately get married. This in turn leads to increased teenage pregnancies and rates of HIV. They will provide a cooperative start-up kit including training in sustainable passion fruit farming, which has a guaranteed market, access to land through a community-based land lease model, and passion fruit seedlings. The girls will also be taught about finance, nutrition, and sexual and reproductive health. They will test their approach in two refugee camps with 180 adolescent girls between 14- and 22-years old who are out of school. The success of the project will be assessed in terms of the effect on poverty and health.

Elena Levashina of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany and Kelly Lee of the University of Washington in the U.S. will use cryoelectron tomography to image the three-dimensional ultrastructure of a protein on the surface of the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum to help design better vaccines. Malaria kills half a million people annually, but there are still no highly effective vaccines available. One of the parasite's coat proteins, CSP, is a prime target for vaccine development. However, not much is known about its natural structure on the live parasite, which is how inhibitory antibodies produced in response to a vaccine will be able to recognize and destroy it. One of the best ways to observe the natural structure of a protein at high resolution is to immobilize it in non-crystalline ice and image it under very low (< −150 °C) temperatures. They will develop protocols to isolate large numbers of highly pure parasites directly from mosquitoes and carefully cryopreserve them on grids to maintain their natural form and enable clearer imaging. They will also use this high-resolution imaging technique to study how antibody binding affects the parasite. Their results will help design new vaccines that can produce highly active, inhibitory antibodies.

Sophie Mower of The Centre for Global Equality in the United Kingdom will establish a collaborative program for technology students at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia using expertise and support from a number of other centers in Africa and beyond to provide training and financial resources for them to research and develop their own innovative solutions to local challenges. Students at the university work on creative solutions such as mapping applications particularly in areas of agriculture and health. However, advancing their ideas is limited by the lack of professional networks and material resources. They will provide a dedicated space at the university and work with the Centre for Global Equality (CGE) and companies in the Cambridge Cluster, both in the United Kingdom, and an African innovation hub. Together, they will provide training for 30 students on co-creating their solutions with end-users to increase their impact. They will also hold an ideation hackathon to generate design ideas, and award $2000 to the six most competitive projects. These will be supported through to prototype development using methods from an incubator approach established at the CGE.