Archives of the
Global Social Venture Competition
2010 Winners
FIRST PLACE – Grand Prize of $25,000
Re:Motion Designs
Stanford University, USA
Contact: Joel Sadler, joel@remotiondesigns.org
With 80% of the world’s amputees living in developing countries, there is a profound need for low-cost lower limb prostheses for the developing world. Modern assistive technology has the potential to re-mobilize lower limb amputees, but at a cost typically in the thousands of dollars. Re:Motion Designs is a for-benefit venture that provides high performance, extreme-affordability prosthetics for the 20 Million amputees in the developing world. Our initial product, the JaipurKnee, is a polymer-based polycentric knee joint that can be manufactured for less than $20 USD, and has been featured by Time Magazine, CNN, BusinessWeek and Fast Company as a major innovation of 2009. Compared with existing low-cost prosthetic knee joints, the JaipurKnee provides a new class of stability and gait efficiency for above-knee amputees, and is currently in field trials in India with over 700 patients fitted to date. For more information visit www.remotiondesigns.org.
SECOND PLACE - $10,000
Ruma
Harvard Business School, USA
Contact: Aldi Haryopratomo, aldi@ruma.co.id
Of the 250 million people in Indonesia, 3/4 live below $2.5 a day, and 2/3 have mobile phones. Ninety percent of these users buy prepaid minutes instead of paying a monthly bill. Ruma sells a business-in-a-box that enables small entrepreneurs to sell prepaid minutes. We buy minutes at a discount from 10 telecom operators and store them in our server. When a customer buys minutes from our entrepreneur, we send the minutes electronically via SMS thereby reducing the need for a physical voucher. We worked with Grameen Foundation to develop this model, which is essentially the next evolution of the Grameen Phone. As of March 2010, we’ve deployed a network of 2,000 entrepreneurs, $3,000 worth of minutes to 80,000 customers each day. Seventy percent of our entrepreneurs were below the poverty line when they joined; now 100% are profitable. We plan to launch a jobs market, micro-insurance and retail application using our prepaid minutes platform.
THIRD PLACE - $5,000
Bags of Hope
Guanghua School of Management – Peking University, China
Contact: Zhen Ghong, cindy.gongzhen@gmail.com
Our company is dedicated to promoting a program named Stacks of Straw, Bags of Hope. We create job opportunities for millions of rural women who are bound to the land in remote areas making very low income to support their families. We provide training for them to process straws to weave bags and promote the distinct local culture through bag design. In this way, we can also prevent tons of straws from being burnt as fertilizers, reducing significant CO2 emission. We plan to sell those straw bags at high-end supermarkets in major cities in China. 30% of our profit will be donated to schools in areas we have cooperation relationships to purchase books. We firmly believe if you give a man a job, you help him only for some time; if you offer a man better education, you help him for a lifetime.
SOCIAL IMPACT ASSESSMENT AWARD - $5,000
WE CARE Solar
Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley, USA
Contact: Laura Stachel, laura@wecaresolar.com
WE CARE (Women’s Emergency Communication and Reliable Electricity) Solar is a social enterprise that saves lives of childbearing mothers and infants in developing regions by providing obstetric health facilities with solar power for lighting, mobile communication and essential medical devices. Pregnancy-related complications cause over 500,000 maternal deaths annually, primarily in Africa and South Asia. Life-saving obstetric care requires reliable lighting, communication and electricity. Approximately 300,000 health facilities worldwide lack this basic infrastructure. WE CARE Solar has developed and field-tested the Solar Suitcase, a user-friendly, portable, plug-and-play solar-electric system that ensures electricity, lighting, and communication for maternity care in low-resource settings. In addition, WE CARE is leveraging and building local market-based capacity and partnerships to distribute, install and maintain these systems. The Solar Suitcase facilitates timely and effective emergency care and reduces maternal and infant morbidity and mortality, thus enhancing family productivity, strengthening health systems, and improving markets for renewable energy.
2010 Finalist Teams
2010 Global Finalists
Amandes, Prasetiya Mulya Business School, Indonesia
AYZH, Rural Technology Business Incubator, IIT, India
Bags of Hope, Guanghua School of Management – Peking University, China
C-Crete Technologies, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Freehap, Chulalongkorn and Thammasat Universities, Thailand
LoChlorine, Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley, USA
MAKANE, ESSEC Business School, France
Nest for All, Mines de Paris, France
Ruma, Harvard Business School, USA
Winduction, London Business School, UK
ReMotion Designs, Stanford University, USA
2010 SIA Finalists
Agrisolutions, Great Lakes Institute of Management, India
BLISS, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Puno, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School of Business, Philippines
Vitanutril, Reims Business School, France
WE CARE Solar, Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley, USA
2009 Events and Winners
Congratulations to all the finalists and winners of the 2009 Global Finals Events!
View the 2009 Finals program as a pdf file.
View the 2009 Symposium program as a pdf file.
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