The heart of the Safe Water Project lies in Vengal village in the Thiravallur District of Tamil Nadu, India . In 2004, diagnostic camps conducted by the Rural Development Center (RDC) in Vengal revealed that 46% of the population was infected with Entamoeba Histolytica, E-Coli, and Whipworm. However, the problem is not as clear as the numbers. The tremendous disease burden in Vengal village is implanted in a vicious reiterative cycle of gender inequality, poor education, and inaccessibility to clean water.

Traditional water treatment programs, including those targeting women and schools, overlook  the cultural norms of female subordination and circumstances of poverty that shape educational opportunities.

The Safe Water Project acts on two powerful ideas:

1.       A sustainable solution to inaccessibility to clean water and adequate sanitation must extend beyond a biomedical treatment and address the social and cultural context.

2.      Harnessing the passions of young people is the most effective method of bringing innovative and rigorous solutions to intricate problems.

The Safe Water Project has mobilizesd American students to raise money through innovative fundraising techniques s and to directly visit Vengal to initiate programs promoting school attendance and greater hygiene practices.  In the 2009-2010 school year, the Safe Water Project has created a collaborative cross-campus effort at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill to address the root causes of poor water and sanitation--gender inequality, poor education, crumbling infrastructure, lack of resources, and lack of public awareness. 

The Safe Water Project aims to give Duke and UNC students the transformative opportunity to implement self-designed social change models as the bedrock for a sustainable, grassroots approach to community water treatment.  

 

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Imagine a relative of yours needing immediate medical help but his/her life is slipping out of control because of a traffic jam hindering the movement of the ambulance you and your relative is in. With things around us becoming smarter and smarter we need traffic too to follow the trend.

My idea proposes a smart traffic network which keeps all ambulances informed of where traffic jams are and alternative routes to avoid them.  Using traffic patterns/concentrations, satellite signals, GPS and other audio/video signals a potentially life saving decision can be made by the driver.
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Loyal Label is a for-profit socially conscious clothing company focused on connecting people to causes they care about through sustainable and stylish apparel. The company is made up of seven lines, each connected to a different cause. The first six lines are Water, Hunger, Life, Earth, Learning, and Peace. Profits from each of these lines will fund initiatives with relevant partner charities. The seventh line, Loyal, is tied to our own cause, The Loyal Foundation, which distributes grants to young aspiring social entrepreneurs. The company is unique in that every item in the product mix is tired directly to a tangible outcome.

Items in each line will be tied to a direct action. For example, a t-shirt from the Hunger line will give a child 20 meals, while one from the Earth line will cover the cost to plant five trees. This model of creating a connection between a customer and a solution is what distinguishes Loyal Label from other companies in the apparel market. We call it the “Consumer/Cause Connection.”

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How to develop a Complete Health Picture of a country? Is it possible to have comprehensive view of the continuum of the health system at one end and the patient profile at the other at once? If such a database can be developed with proper linkages, how can it be used to design an effective health care policy for a developing country?

 

I have an idea that addresses this issue. For the rural population of India, access to healthcare facilities is primarily through the state-run Health institutions. These institutions are often far away from tribal hamlets and villages. The limited resource setting, combined with low literacy, makes health care fragmented and ineffective.

 

It is my idea to develop a comprehensive database of patients, who accesse public or private health care. It can applied for a pilot project where a million population in a single administrative unit is taken as the target group. The prototype will be a module with essential details such as age, weight, family history, latest tests undergone, medicines used and diagnoses.

 

The data is entered into a net-connected computer database by any medical/para-medical personnel that the patient consults and the chronological number in the list is issued as Patient No. The updates happen simultaneously across the whole spectrum of health institutions in the pilot area.

 

The aim is to develop an inclusive health profile, available wherever the patient goes, perhaps, eventually linking it up with India’s most ambitious Unique Identification Project to be started next year. Harsha Vadlamani110.0

Over 15 million children worldwide have lost one or both parents to AIDS – equivalent to the number of people living in New York, Paris, and Bangkok combined. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, over 12 million children have been orphaned by the pandemic. Experts believe that millions more orphans remain unaccounted for in India, China and Russia.

In addition to the psychological trauma of losing a parent, orphans are often subject to discrimination and are less likely to receive healthcare, schooling and other needed services. Deprived of protection, education, support and love, they face malnutrition, illness and HIV infection and are easy prey to many forms of exploitation: forced labor, prostitution and child soldiering.

Too little attention is given to orphans and vulnerable children. Few resources are reaching the families and communities that provide the front-line response.

SPARSH is committed to bring the needs of these children to the forefront of the battle against HIV and AIDS. The team is committed to ensuring that people are educated about this pandemic and the situation of these AIDS orphans by reaching out to individuals and communities around the world. We would manage all donations made by individuals, communities and organizations and ensure that the funds are disbursed to the rightful beneficiary who has a good past record and a zeal to make a change. People such as Sekani Nyasulu who have sold their own belongings to support a family of 30 AIDS orphans.

The name SPARSH which is Hindi for “Touch” is aimed at dispelling beliefs that AIDS can spread through touch or direct contact with an AIDS affected patient. It also emphasizes our commitment to bring about a change by reaching out and touching the lives of all those affected by this pandemic.

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The initiative is undertaken squarely in the concept of “social entrepreneurship” where objective is not only normal profits but also the social capital necessary to advance the developmental goal. Copper device for preventing diarrhoea is a completely new line of thinking brought out by recent research at Foundation of Revitalization of Local Health Traditions, Bangalore, India (FRLHT). The focus till date has been on cure of Diarrhoea and related diseases through ORS rather than preventive mechanisms like using Copper to treat stored water. This project will be implemented in consultation with FRLHT.  It needs to be emphasized that the objective of the project is not profit maximization. The target end-customers for the project would be urban slum dwellers and rural population having high incident rates of Diarrhoea. To market this product, local NGO network will be used to leverage their contacts as the target population consists of diverse and discursive communities. In doing so, incentives will be provided to this marketing intermediaries. The optimum price is arrived at Rs 55/per unit at which the end users will be interested to buy taking the view of hospital cost incurred by them. Production facilities are designed to produce 1000 units per day after studying the market.  Unused lands of FRLHT will be used to lay out facilities. The raw material for the project would come from copper deposits of Chitradurga district ofstate Karnataka, India. Out of the total operating costs, working capital takes up the major chunk. One year cash flow is calculated where the NPV comes around Rs3, 16,594 with an IRR of 2.50%. As part of the financial sensitivity analysis, it is found that highest risk is associated with selling price fluctuation.

 

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CIPLI is the unique EDUCATIVE MEDICAL SERVICE, in the world, created to recover patients with: Mental Illness and Conduct Disorders (Psychological Problems), WITHOUT THE USE OF DRUGS. We offer treatment/prevention service and guarantee patient integral recovery.  CIPLI’s theory has been approved in seven World Congresses and 20 International Congresses of Psychiatry since 2005 (World Psychiatric Association WPA, WASP, WADP, EPA, etc).

CIPLI has been created to RECOVER any type of Mental Illness and also restitute, to the patient, the direction of his internal energy: getting a permanent Homeostasis. All those help in the treatment of different diseases, among them: Cancer and other many regressive forms of the Being, WITHOUT THE USE OF MEDICINES. Medicines do not have the capacity to grant a permanent homeostasis, and therefore it does not get us to total health restitution. There is a lack of scientific tool to solve:

a) Corporal energetic anarchy, due to “Inversion in the direction of the Internal Energy.”

b) Internal conflicts (contradictions) which sometimes people silence or look for disguised aid to not ‘complicate’ the situation.

Thus, this service is for hopeless or declared terminally ill people or for the public who feel that nobody can entirely understand them.

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Ever since the Pakistan military initiated ground offensive in Waziristan, thousands of inhabitants of the conflict-affected areas have fled to neighboring districts including Dera Ismail Khan and Tank in the southern area of North West Frontier Province and are taking refuge in with friends and family in local communities. Internally Displaced people face difficult hygiene conditions with limited access to safe drinking water and sanitation. UNICEF reports significant water quality problems for the IDPs in Dera Ismail Khan and Tank. Provision of clean drinking water is a major logistical challenge. Boiling the water is an option but energy is not readily available and the other alternative sources are scarce, limited in quantity and have drawbacks. 

The solution lies in the newly developed gravity-driven device which will remove all particulates before passing the water through a membrane that removes bacterial and viral contamination The clean water is stored, ready for use. It can serve the need of 30 people and has a lifetime of 2-3 months.It will produce 8L per hour of potable water. It can be folded for the ease of transport and storage. It does not require any chmeical purifier, hand power, energy or pressure.

AQUAValue aims to import this device and distribute it to across the region. This will address the need for clean supply of water in the region. pate100.0

Of all the environmental problems we face today, one of the most important is surely mercury pollution; it travels the atmosphere, gets into the food chain and is the most toxic – non-radioactive – material that exists. Surprisingly 30% of all mercury pollution comes from artisanal small-scale gold mining in rural areas such as South America, Africa and Asia. There they use mercury to extract gold from river silt. We know that mercury is a deadly and insidious toxin, capable of destroying nervous tissue and crippling children, and it has to be stopped.

Fortunately, OroClean has the solution. OroClean proposes to rid the world of 30% of mercury pollution by creating innovative and effective mining methods for artisanal miners. The core of our solution is a small scale, hand powered centrifuge that builds on proven technology for separating gold from silt. The patent has expired on centrifuge gold mining, and OroClean is ready to take advantage of the opportunity to create a product which not only can  increase the income of rural miners, but also correct the plague that is mercury pollution.

So please, read on and further the cause of mercury free gold mining.

Save the world.

Vote for OroClean.

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Working with local community groups and leaders in rural areas of developing countries, we use storytelling with low-cost video and digital cameras (e.g., flipcams) to empower community members to produce their own health promotion and disease prevention materials on health topics they consider relevant to their lives. Our target community is one which typically is overlooked by officials and neglected in development of health policy. By providing them with a way to make their communities heard, we are helping to bring the issues important to them to the forefront. The end products will be used in photography exhibitions and local film festivals in schools, elderly associations and community centers as a method of conveying the message of care and need to the community. The generated material can also be utilized as political currency that can influence elected decision-makers to pursue innovative policy to benefit the overall health of the community. Additionally, it can be used to help engage the local, private sector to participate in the solution of the problem with positive exposure. tudoflui110.0

The greatest water-quality problem in developing countries is the prevalence of diseases caused by pollution from human waste. Our group has developed a financially sustainable model to convert human waste into a useful fuel and a powerful fertilizer. Our group is looking to utilize a system that will hold the waste in airtight containers while microorganisms convert the waste into methane. The methane is compressed into tanks and sold as a source of cooking fuel. The digested sludge can then be sold to farmers as a fertilizer.  By providing an additional fuel source, we hope to also address the rising deforestation problem in the same countries. This comes from the lack of available energy for everyday uses such as cooking, forcing individuals to rely on the burning of wood. We will partner with LatrinTec, a company in Port Harcourt, Nigeria which has developed a business hauling human waste away from latrines. This has improved both the health of the citizens and the environment. However, LatrinTec pays a fee to dispose of the waste even though the sludge retains a high energy content, value which is currently untapped. In a partnership with LatrinTec, our system will turn a harmful living situation into a profitable and sustainable energy solution for the people of Nigeria. cpuhalla1270.0

Worldwide, developing countries that have been ravaged by war and devastated by natural disasters are inhabited by a staggering number of amputees in desperate need of artificial limbs to perform daily tasks.  The recent catastrophic events in Haiti alone have resulted in an estimated 75 amputations per day.  The Prosthetics Initiative will address this issue through a high-impact and sustainable program that will provide prosthetic legs to amputees in developing countries, which account for 80% of the world’s amputees.

In a first-time partnership with the service-learning and study-abroad program, Mercer On Mission, our Mercer University School of Engineering’s biomedical engineering students and faculty have developed the Universal Socket Prosthetic (USP).  Our plan is to inexpensively manufacture and efficiently distribute USPs to areas with a great need for assistive prosthetic technology.  Last summer 17 Mercer students and staff were able to fit 35 Vietnamese amputees with prosthetic legs at no cost to them.

This is a highly sustainable project that we plan to develop into indigenous micro industries in multiple developing countries.  Last year in Vietnam we trained engineering students and medical professionals to fit and care for patients using the USP; we expect to repeat this process in each country we visit.  Mercer industrial engineers are also developing a manufacturing system prototype that can be universally reproduced.  Once optimized in an experimental facility at Mercer, this manufacturing system will be easily replicable, whether on a college campus in the United States or in a cottage industry in Vietnam.

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A new credit card company that gives you charity reward money instead of normal rewards points. When you sign up for this credit card company you can either receive a generic “Green” card, so that when people see your card they know you donate your reward points to charity, or you can choose a specific charity to have your reward points donated to, and that charity’s name and picture will be on that card, so that when you pull out the card people will know you donate all your rewards to that charity. We think people will go for these types of credit cards because they want to impress other people with their charitable giving.

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Of Rags is a fair trade fashion cooperative that combines elements of New York style and the hippest Ghanaian fashions into unique, handmade artful clothing. Established in September 2009, Of Rags is the vision of J. Branson, an NYU student and social entrepreneur who studied at NYU’s Ghana Program during the Fall of 2009, and RAAM, a Ghanaian designer in Accra, the capital. They have quickly grown their business into a full clothing line available for sale in Ghana, in New York  and online at www.ofrags.com. The company has plans to employ additional seamstresses at fair trade wages, and eventually to work with new design partners, first in Ghana and then around the globe in a cooperative structure selling through retailers, Of Rags’ own stores, and online. An injection of capital will allow us to proceed with the Of Rags business plan.

The business plan also calls for donating 40 percent of the profits to The Of Rags Foundation, which will be run by Neha Dubli, who is also an NYU student. The Foundation initially has partnered with one of the few special education centers in Accra, Ghana to establish a much-needed scholarship program. In addition, The Foundation will coordinate with the West Africa AIDS Foundation to help fund the organization’s pioneering peer education program.  Of Rags also aims to sponsor and coordinate a series of symposiums on fair trade, corporate citizenship and community empowerment targeted at youth in both New York City and Accra.   ofrags400.0

Our plan involves installing charging stations around the country that are solar powered.  The solar panels will be placed along roadsides, on roofs of popular parking areas and buildings, at rest stops alongside the highway, on top of new pavilions over currently open parking lots and other areas.  These charging stations would include an electrical panel that will hang down from the overhead panels, allowing the customer to plug their car into the power source.  The service would work much like a parking meter in the sense that the user would pay for a certain fee based on how much power they needed to recharge their battery.  Once the time has expired, the charger would stop charging the individual’s car and their account would be debited based on their usage.
Our proposal not only reduces carbon emissions but it also promotes a new cleaner form of transportation, creates jobs for the development and maintenance of these facilities and reduces our dependence on foreign gasoline as a country.  Creating these charging stations will promote the use of electric vehicles and help the public see that there is a sustainable means of travel now available to us.  

 

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Serving Zambia is dedicated to helping children in Zambia reach their fullest potential. Serving Zambia currently provides over 600 children in Lusaka with tennis instruction, adult supervision, and fun. Tennis is coached in a positive, supportive fashion with an emphasis on teamwork, sportsmanship, discipline, and hard work.

Zambia is a country devastated by HIV/AIDS. UNICEF estimates that 1 in 6 Zambian adults is HIV positive, one of the highest rates in the world. The average life expectancy in Zambia is 38.4 years. Millions of Zambians live below the World Bank poverty threshold of $1/day. A quarter of the children working with Serving Zambia are among the 600,000 orphans of the AIDS crisis in Zambia. The impact of HIV/AIDS has so weakened Zambia’s traditional extended family structure that many of the children in the program have no consistent adult supervision or care.

Serving Zambia’s coaches are positive role models for the children and have established on-going, caring relationships with them. These unpaid coaches volunteer all their time and have developed numerous dedicated and talented junior tennis players. Several players are now nationally ranked. However, Serving Zambia’s mission goes beyond tennis. Tennis is used as a tool to motivate the children and demonstrate the rewards of self-discipline and hard work. Although ultimately tennis will enable these children to realize their own potential, more immediately, Serving Zambia provides order, caring, and structure to children who have little in their lives.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Serving-Zambia/213698885170?v=info&ref=ts

 

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Imagine for a moment that you're a doctor.  You have spent 7 years of your life training so you can diagnose and treat patients, in this case diabetics and other chronic disorder sufferers.  You work in the developing world, likely in India, since there are more diabetics here than anywhere else in the world.  The number of patients invading your clinic is already alarming and only increasing exponentially.  You also know that you are just half of the equation in battling this potentially lethal disorder.  You can check lab values and recommend medications, but teaching your patients how to change their lives to effectively manage this disease is the other half.  However, you don't have the time to spend hours counseling each patient, nor do you have evidence-based guidelines to follow, easy-to-comprehend literature to disseminate, or even standardized clinic forms to help you remember what to check for at each patient visit.

Across the world, a number of simple management and patient empowerment tools, like the ones mentioned, have been shown to markedly improve health outcomes in diabetics.  In a survey of Indian physicians, a lack of such resources was cited as the most significant barrier to optimal care.  We aim to create a web portal, free to diabetes clinicians, with such outcome-improving management and education tools for dissemination to patients.  By arming the physician with an arsenal of proven, population-specific resources, we are arming the patient in the fight against diabetes.
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The main idea of this project is to establish a restaurant which will be named “Free Hugs Restaurant”. This restaurant will be completely different and unique from currently existing restaurants in the world. All those who work in this restaurant will be people living with HIV. First of all we will recruit some PLHAs and provide them with different kinds of trainings such as cooking, baking, waiter, reception, etc. After the completion of training we will open a restaurant where we will place the HIV positive people who had received the training. Any customer who comes to the restaurant will be welcomed in gate by two PLHAs by giving hug. This is how the restaurant got its name free hugs restaurant. Through the restaurant, general people will understand that HIV is not transmitted by hugging to HIV positive people and HIV positive people can also work like normal people. Also the restaurant helps in developing entrepreneurship culture among HIV positive people. The restaurant provides job to people living with HIV and helps them to reintegrate in their society. Once the restaurant comes in full operation, the restaurant will generate income. The income generated by the restaurant will be used for providing education to children of HIV positive people and different entrepreneurship training to other HIV positive people.  sanjeevrajneupane110.0

 Medical Box is a Web TV Channel, where specialists from different fields of medicine congregate, with the intention of creating different tools, such as: 

•                  TV Shows

•                 Interviews

•                 Documentaries

•                 Blogs

•                 Health Directory

•                 News and relevant events

•                 Congress coverage, and so on. 

Thus, creates networks of information between countries, universities, professors and researchers, enabling us to make progress on issues of health, and also making available to society in general, information that is useful in preventing diseases.

Medical Box, considers that information must be accessible to human beings and must be expressed by different people, which can give their opinion, expose their doubts and find answers to this. For this reason we consider it necessary for the creation of an editorial board, composed of prestigious professionals in each specialty, who will provide editorial credibility, monitoring each of the content published on the different areas.

Why limit us by just reading books, if we can also watch surgeries with comments from specialists, and video interviews? This makes Medical Box.

 TARGET AUDIENCE:

•                 Society in general

•                 Health professionals

•                 Researchers in medicine

•                 Students in health sciences

 

COVERAGE:

•                 Teaching

•                 Medical Update

•                 Diffusion

•                 Preventive Health

 

The demo, www.medicalbox.tv, is a synthesized way in which we will show the diseases. The real objective is, to experience in-depth diseases more often, each one broken down from different perspectives and into chapters. This demo has two language versions, being the spanish, the main language.

 

Mariana Estrella190.0