As Executive Director of WIN Foundation, it is my pleasure to address all of you through this newsletter.
WIN
Foundation was setup with a generous contribution by our Founder and
Chairman, Mr. Chirag Patel, with a vision to bring innovative ideas for
bringing sustainable impact among the poor and lower middle-class
communities in India, in the twin domains of (i) Water and Sanitation
and (ii) Maternal and Child Health. In a short span of 3 years, we have
supported several innovative projects and established unbelievably
valuable partnerships. This issue bringsspotlight on innovations by startups and institutions to tackle critical challenges in our domains,
and how WIN Foundation support has enabled our NGO partners to weave in
these innovations within their projects, and empowered the communities
to use them, improving their quality of life and livelihoods.
While
the covid pandemic has devastated the world including India, we remain
committed to our vision, partnerships and projects. Our partners have
shown exemplary determination to continue projects in the field under
trying circumstances. Our communities have demonstrated an ability to
quickly grasp new technologies like web-video calls for communication
and training.
The WIN team continues to engage with multiple stakeholders, including
reputed NGOs, premier Institutions and innovative startups, to bring
product innovations, technologies and processes at the ground level to
empower communities at the grassroots.
New initiatives like an upcoming skilling platform and an Agri-water
data system for smart agriculture aims to strengthen the ongoing
projects with greater depth and build sustainability and scalability
among the marginal communities. India is now coming out of the 2nd wave
of the pandemic and has redoubled its efforts to fight covid pandemic,
including increase in pace of vaccinations. The monsoon has also
started promisingly. We look forward to working vigorously with our
partners, to make positive impact for our communities. Please
feel free to reach out to us, at info@winfoundations.org, to offer suggestions and ideas to explore partnerships for social impact.
Sincerely
Ron Mehta
Executive Director, WIN Foundation
(Guest Editorial)
LATEST UPDATES
India
saw the quarter start with a severe impact of the 2nd wave of Covid19,
with record high cases and distress, in April and May. Large parts of
the country faced lockdowns. Since mid-May, cases have declined and
country has opened up in June. During this tough period, WIN Foundation
contributed to a program to cater the survival needs of urban poor and
homeless in communities of Ahmedabad, by our partner, MHT.
All through the pandemic, WIN Foundation has focused on the following:
How
to best support partners and communities, to ensure that our projects
continue and then recover once things return to normal.
Generate new ideas, proposals and activities, which create long term impact potential.
Under
our Innovative Product Market validation support scheme we recently
introduced an innovative technology for Modular Cold Chain solutions,
developed by Tan90 Thermal Solutions, in the Kutch, Gujarat, through
our community partner Kutch Fodder Fruit & Forest Development
Trust, together with Tata Power - Mundra, Kutch. This enables better
storage and transportation for Fresh Vegetables, Fruits, Flowers, etc.,
for longer life.
To enable better use of data from the several water, weather and soil
measurement equipment from startups we introduced last year, we are
working on a web+mobile application to provide integrated data storage
on cloud, and dashboard views with combined data, to generate advisory
for smart agriculture and water conservation.
To deepen and scale up the empowerment at grassroots through skilling,
we are developing an online skilling platform ”Skilling-to-WIN”,
using the open edx platform from MIT/Harvard. The platform is
offered to other NGOs and skilling providers at no cost, to offer their
skilling programs for social impact.
Under our collaboration with the iTIC Incubator at IIT
Hyderabad, to scout new technologies / solutions for critical
technology needs in (i) Maternal Child health and (ii) Water and
sanitation, we launched `WIN Challenge - Track 1’ for AI/ML solutions
for -Child Growth and Health Monitoring.
We have signed an MOU with Coastal Power Gujarat Ltd (subsidiary of
Tata Power Ltd) CGPL with an objective to explore areas of cooperation
for supporting grassroots innovations and social impact startups.
SPOTLIGHT -INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL IMPACT
Need for Social Impact Innovations
Innovations for social impact domains
are essential to make a quantum jump in improving the quality of life,
livelihoods and earnings, for the poor and lower middle class
communities, and particularly among the rural and tribal areas in the
country.
Empowerment of the community to take ownership of adoption process is a
must, including quality skilling, for innovations to take root and
succeed. This also increases circular economy within the community,
maintains social vitality, and brings in a strong sense of
self-governance.
Following are some examples of strong community impact of innovative technologies, products and services:
Digital
Technologies and platforms now serve as access points for delivering a
variety of electronic services to villages, encourage digital and
financial inclusivity, promote rural entrepreneurship and build rural
livelihoods
Point
of care health tech devices enable field health workers to provide
better value added health services for improved diagnostic and
therapeutic care to rural and tribal areas, as well as urban
slums.
In
agriculture, which employs maximum people in rural India, new
technologies, coupled with smart farming practices, help farmers shift
from input-intensive agriculture to knowledge-intensive
agriculture.
Water
recharge structures and water level and flow monitoring helps water
security for villages, assuring them water for household, agricultural
and other needs.
In subsequent pages, we give many examples of WIN Foundation's experiences in introducing the above innovations.
Interview with Dr. Chintan Vaishnav, Mission Director, Atal Innovation Mission, Niti Aayog, Government of India.
1. Tell us something about your journey in innovations for society?
As
a 20 year doing Bachelors in Engineering in Bangalore, the
thought that my work ought to improve lives, became strong in my mind,
and influenced most of my major career decisions. After completing my
Masters in Electrical and
Computer Engineering in US, my professional journey began with a 6 year
stint of purely engineering focused R & D work at Bell
Laboratories, working at the forefront of Information Technology
research. The motive that impelled me then to leave behind such
engineering-focused corporate research to become a “penniless graduate
student” of interdisciplinary studies at MIT was the observation that,
while we do know how to produce a technological artifact, because of
lack of well developed theories about how that artifact impacts its
environment (e.g., market, policy, society), we fail to address some of
our most pressing challenges, such as hunger and poverty.
My journey as a socio-technologist began at MIT during my PhD in
Engineering Systems (now called “MIT Institute for Data Systems and
Society”). Here, I learned to apply cutting-edge tools to study,
design, and implement large-scale socio-technical systems comprising
both technological and human complexity. Since then, the long-term
objective that has motivated my research, and therefore driven
the selection of short-term projects within it, is: How can we avoid the gross inequity in the Information world, which we still endure in the material world?
2.
Why are innovations critical for social impact?
How can they be promoted on a larger scale among the communities
and how can communities be partners in the process?
Innovations
— be it technological, commercial, or behavioral — offer a way to
induce non-linear improvements in the society. For example,
biometric ID like Aadhaar had a visible impact on the financial
inclusion in a non-linear fashion. Such an impact in a limited time
frame is more likely with technological innovations.
While Aadhaar is a top-down intervention, many bottom-up innovations
can be developed for and with the society. Such efforts are visible in
all domains like health, water, agriculture, energy, environment, etc.
In my experience, promoting such innovations on a large scale requires
a clear understanding of the problem faced by the society; a high
quality solution that is affordable, stable and reliable; and a
business model that is inclusive of the communities that engage in
producing, distributing and using the solution.
The core logic behind community partnership is the following: one can
pass on something to the community only if the product or service
commands enough margin based on the value created that someone would
pay for. Such margin is a function of the quality of technology and/or
service. Of course, the innovator needs a mindset to share it
equitably; in other words, to distribute a part of one’s own profit to
maximize the impact.
3.
What are key initiatives taken by the Atal Innovation Mission
for supporting innovations, important for society, across the
country?
At
one level, with its mandate to create a culture of innovation and
entrepreneurship throughout the country, all of the work supported by
Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) has a societal angle. Our
innovation ecosystem, with all its fervor and excitement, is still in
an early stage, having tapped only a small portion of our nation’s
creative potential. Also, the innovation infrastructure seeded by Atal
Innovation Mission via the various Atal Tinkering Labs, Atal Incubation
Centers, and Atal Community Innovation Centers is yet to see
self-sustaining revenue model. AIM's work fills this market gap to
create the ecosystem for the society.
To support infrastructure for innovation specifically focused on
societal impact, AIM launched Atal Community Innovation Centers (ACIC),
with the goal to spur community innovation in underserved and unserved
areas of the country. Presently, there are eight ACICs across the
nation operated by community organizations. The nature of problems
and innovations in these centers are distinctly different from those in
incubation centers located in large cities. One not only finds the
local problems being articulated, but also the innovators who
understand them and are passionate about solving problems of their
communities. The nature of support they need is also different: being
able to operate in regional language, tools to develop personal as well
as technical skills, and so on. The mandate of this program is to have
50 such centers. 4. How do you see the role of foundations like WIN Foundation in social innovation for social impact?
Foundations
like WIN Foundation bring a unique form of support to the social impact
space, with a rare combination of both the grassroots as well as global
experience. They have empathy for the problems of our underserved
communities, an understanding of what can be done in terms of
innovation to address them, and the sophistication to help innovators
operate in the most structured markets. It is my hope that their work
will help us harness the immense creativity exhibited by innovators
that hail from second, third, and fourth tier cities of our nation.
Presently, I see much potential in these areas yet a weak innovation
ecosystem to support them. WIN Foundation’s operation in this geography
can produce a win-win for everyone.
About Dr. Chintan Vaishnav : Dr.
Chintan Vaishnav, is currently Mission Director, Atal Innovation
Mission, Niti Aayog, Government of India. He is a Senior Lecturer at
MIT's Sloan School of Management and is Academic Director and a member
of the founding team of MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design. He
is a socio-technologist, and his work encompasses understanding human
as well as technological complexity in large systems, and creating
socio-technical systems for improving lives in underserved
communities. He holds a PhD in Engineering Systems from MIT. He
also holds a BA in Indian Classical Music.
Key challenges in bringing social impact innovation at grassroots
Lack
of knowledge and trust among “customers”, to try out new products, due
to lack of connect between innovators / sellers and the communities
Lack of local skilled persons to install and maintain the products and services, leading to high cost and poor up keep.
The
above results in even poor customers paying a high price for products
and services in financial and non- financial terms. E.g. cost of poor
healthcare services lead to frequent and debilitating diseases directly
affecting their earnings, while poor agricultural practices lead
to poor crop yields, soil erosion and often unpaid loans.
WIN Foundation support for social impact innovations
WIN Foundation supports innovations in our domains at grassroots through following programs:
Scout
and support innovations through institutions, startups and and other
grassroots innovators, bringing ecosystem support at various stages in
a startup’s journey
Identify
startups with promising innovative technologies, products and business
models, and support them for the critical product market validation
phase through our partner NGOs
Open up opportunities for funding for growth through suitable connects
We promote positive behaviour change in the communities by making them partners in adoption of innovations through following:
Help
innovative product introduction in communities through partnerships
with key NGOs, to help trial the product, with community empowerment,
training and involvement.
Train
grassroots level youth, including proactively involving women and
girls, to understand, deploy, use and maintain the technology and
products. This enables them to be change agents in their communities,
improve their livelihoods and earning potential, and drive greater
local circular economy.
Enable the NGOs to provide better services with greater innovation and technology quotient.
Overview of challenges in WATSAN which drive innovations
Within WATSAN, the following diagram depicts the major challenges and innovation drivers in Water.
To
maximise water availability and optimize its usage, accurate and
frequent measurements for (i) water availability, water levels and
water quality, (ii) soil moisture, soil nutrients and (iii)
monitoring weather play a major role, enabling feedback for precise
control, use and treatment of water and other resources. In
addition, for agriculture, the crop status data also helps in
determining irrigation needs, throughout the crop season. This in turn,
has driven development of innovative low cost field usable devices for
measurements and quick results. The combined data enables a holistic
view and for better and timely decisions. This also empowers the local
communities with greater understanding and application of knowledge and
tools.
Innovative products introduced by WIN through its Innovative Product Market Validation scheme:
WIN Foundation has supported a range of such innovations from several startups.
Soil and Weather Monitoring Stations
Low
cost Soil and Weather Monitoring Stations technology has been designed,
with capability to transmit data to cloud in real time, to provide
information on soil moisture and weather including rainfall, humidity
etc, to enable irrigation decisions.
Start-up:Proximal Soilsense Technologies, Founders : Dr.
Rajul Patkar, PhD, IIT Bombay, co-founders: Prof. Maryam S Baghini,
Professor, IIT Bombay, and Prof. V Ramgopal Rao, Director, IIT Delhi
and formerly faculty at IIT Bombay.
(Supported under WIN Innovative market validation program, through its community Partner ACT)
We
started a technology pilot with Win Foundation and their
community partners, ACT (Arid Communities and Technologies). A
few brainstorming sessions along with WIN and ACT paved the way to add
a few more important features to the existing platform that would not
only benefit ACT but would also help SoilSens in improving the
product for other stakeholders. Win foundation has not only connected
us to ACT but also their other partners like CGPL and KFFFT. I would
like to state that working with WIN Foundation would be akin to working
with an extended family. The support that WIN Foundation,
especially Mr.Paresh Vora and Dr.Yogesh
Jadeja, provided to SoilSens is invaluable.
Dr. Rajul Patkar
Founder of Proximal Soilsense Technologies
Soil and water testing kit
Low
Cost and Field usable Water and Soil Testing Kits enable
estimation of the concentration of nutrients as well as contaminants,
in order to determine fertilizers or other corrective steps for soil
and water, for specific crops, in a precise and dynamic manner. Water
testing also enables determining potability of water and treatment for
potability.
Start-up developing Technology : Foundation For Environmental Monitoring (FFEM), Bangalore, Founder: Mr. Samuel Rajkumar
(Supported under WIN Innovative market validation program, through its community Partners ACT, Samerth)
Electronic Groundwater level Sensors
Electronic
Borewell Water level sensors monitor the level of water in
tanks, borewells and dugwells, at low cost, and transmit changes
in water level to a cloud server in real time.
This
enables farmers, village panchayats, village clusters, to monitor
ground water levels in individual wells, and overall ground water
availability in the zone being monitored. It can also be used to
remotely control the operation of pumps if required.
Start-up developing Technology : CFar Sensors India Pvt.Ltd., Pune, Founders: Mr.Craig Desouza and Mr.Rahul Chauhan
(Supported under WIN Innovative market validation program, through its community Partners ACT)
User's Voice :
Koli
Dharamshi Baubhai, Sharneshwar near Badalpar village says that” The
soil testing process is new to me, and I have done it for the first
time for my farmland and I will start mixing the necessary ingredients
which will improve the condition of my soil in the coming monsoon
season. Samerth’s team has provided me the necessary information for
improvement of my farmland.”
Agri and Water data system
This
system brings together data on soil, water, weather and crop progress,
collected from (i) various instruments mentioned earlier, (ii) manual
measurements and (iii) public data like weather, to provide integrated
view of data, This will enable multi-level decision making, (i) by
farmer themselves and (ii) from which experts who can provide more
refined advisories at farm and village level, enabling marginal farmers
to implement smart agriculture practices. Over 2 – 3 years, such
collected data will also enable AI/ML techniques for more impactful
advisories.
Startup developing the above application and platform: Proximal Soilsense Technologies, with ACT as on-ground implementation partner.
The application is sponsored and supported by WIN Foundation.
Modular Cold chain - storage and transport
Need :
Almost 40% of farm produce goes waste due to improper storage and
transportation facilities. Efficient cold chain systems can reduce food
product wastage by 75%. However, cold chain systems tend to be large
and capital intensive.
Tan90 has developed modular Cold Chain solutions for
storage and transport for Fresh Vegetables, Fruits, Flowers and Fish.
(Agri-Nutrition). With capacities ranging from 20 litres to
600 litres, these come at affordable price for marginal
farmers, FPOs etc. They are also energy efficient, including some
products using natural evaporative cooling.
They can extend the shelf life of
fresh perishable product by 2 - 4
days, thereby reduce wastage, provide better
quality for longer time, and more time to reach larger
markets, resulting in better price realization and earnings
for farmers.
Start-up developing Technology : Tan90 Thermal Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, Co-Founder - Dr. Soumalya Mukherjee
(Supported under WIN Innovative market validation program, through its community Partners: KFFFDT and Tata Power)
Tan90
thermal solutions is working on cost-effective de-centralized cold
chain solutions aimed for marginal farmers. Through WIN Foundation, we
have deployed our energy-efficient cold storages, meant for both
storage and transport in Kutch, with Samriddhi as the community
partner. Creating awareness about cost-effective cold storage is of
primary importance, particularly when marginal farmers are the users.
WIN Foundation, along with Samriddhi has helped us in setting up
infrastructure, thereby creating awareness among the users. Not only
that, WIN Foundation is working closely to evaluate the impact of the
installed units, which forms the baseline for future installations that
can reduce post-harvest losses, primarily for low value, high volume,
and highly perishable leafy vegetables during the peak summer or during
lockdown periods.
We are excited to take our partnership ahead with the firm belief of creating more impact at the grassroots.
Dr. Soumalya Mukherjee
Co-Founder, Tan90 thermal solutions
Water Treatment/Recycling solutions :
Need
: The modern lifestyle and industries have vastly increased usage
of water. This has also caused degeneration of water quality. Current
technologies like RO are highly wasteful, generating high % of highly
salty reject water. The industrial and domestic waste water
contaminates water bodies and poses serious health problems. Recycling
technologies can solve this problem and at the same time make available
additional water for consumption.
Chakra household TDS reduction device using electrostatic principle and nanotechnology Rural
household nano technology based water purifier, through capacitive
deionization, using carbon nanotubes coated cellulosic threads as
electrodes. It reduces TDS from water upto 4000 TDS, by over 85%, with
less than 5% water wastage, and running on a single 1.5 V cell. As
against this, a typical RO system consumes more electricity and has
over 50% water wastage.
Technology and field usable prototypes being developed by: Dr. C. Subramaniam, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
WIN is supporting development of this technology and prototypes.
Surface Engineered Particle Based Water decontamination Filter
Low
cost, water disinfection using Surface Engineered Particle (SEP)
technology. This provides effective disinfection at low cost and using
very low amounts of any additives like silver-nano particles. It does
not require any electricity, is gravity driven, and can be used as a
point-of-use water filter in the rural or tribal areas or urban slums.
The product can also be useful during crisis situations like floods,
earthquakes, etc.
Technology and field usable prototypes being developed by: Prof. Chinmay Ghoroi, B.S. Gelot Chair Professor of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar
WIN is supporting development the prototypes and its deployment with potential users.
NanoPearl - Multivalent two stage nano engineered water purification solution
NanoPearl
is a multivalent two stage solution, consisting of an adsorbent made up
of conscious metallic nanoparticle embedded inside the nano-engineered
crystal structure. It simultaneously tackles high TDS, heavy-metal and
microbial-contamination in a single unit.
Start-up developing Technology: NanoPearl – Deau Technologies Pvt.Ltd, Founder : Dr.Prerna Tomke
WIN sponsored category award winner– NBEC’20 (National Bio
Entrepreneurship Competition, on behalf of Department of Biotechnology,
Government of India)
Water Recycling plant to convert Water discharged from STP to Potable levels
School
of Environmental Science at IIT Kharagpur has setup a sewage treatment
plant to treat sewage from the campus. With WIN Foundation support, a
project is being undertaken to convert output of sewage treatment plant
right up to potable level water, by removal of: Organic matter,
Suspended solids, Nitrogen, Pathogens, Personal care, Pharmaceutical
residues, through a multi-stage process which will pilot alternate
low-cost technologies. At present, the project team is carrying
out detailed performance analysis and also studying viability of
employing this technology in a village level pilot plant.
This project is lead by: Dr. Makarand M Ghangrekar, Head of School of Environmental Science and Engineering, and Professor, Civil Engineering.
Sanitation :
Robotic device for cleaning septic tanks and sewer lines
Need :
Human cleaning of septic tanks and sewer lines, a highly perilous and
undignified activity, causes several deaths every year. Though made
illegal, an estimated 8,00,000 workers continue to work in the same
dangerous manner, due to lack of better equipment and for lack of other
alternative work, exposing them to toxic gases and the filth.
Alcheme
is developing HomeSEP, a robotic solution for cleaning septic tanks and
sewer lines, by homogenizing, breaking and then sucking out the sludge.
The cost effective and easy to use product aims to enable the sanitary
workers to provide these critical services in a dignified and healthy
way, without manual scavenging.
Start-up developing Technology : Alcheme Founders : Prof. Prabhu Rajagopal Professor, IIT Madras and Mr. Divanshu Kumar
WIN sponsored category award winner– NBEC’19 (National Bio
Entrepreneurship Competition, on behalf of Department of Biotechnology,
Government of India.)
Smart Retrofit Toilet Kit To Transform Existing Toilet Into Disabled Friendly Toilet
Need : More than 55 lakhs physically challenged (in-movement) and 1.5cr osteoarthritis patient in India go through a painful experience while using a toilet.
Specially designed wall mounted foldable commode attachment, providing
height adjustment through motorised and non-motorised versions,
make every toilet easily usable by disabled and osteoarthritis
patients, thus increasing toilet usage with better hygiene. This also
allows the disabled to use toilets on their own, with greater dignity,
for both men and women.
Start-up developing Technology – Oston Technology, Founders: Mr.Kumar Kalika and Mr.Sayar Singh
(Supported under WIN Innovative market validation program, through its community Partner: MHT)
Maternal and Child Health / Nutrition / Med devices - Innovations
Mother and Child health face major challenges of:
(i) Lack of medical diagnostics and care facilities in remote areas or urban slums, coupled with lack of doctors, and
(ii) Poor nutrition practices and habits among communities.
Remote diagnostic and care: importance for community
Easy
to use and field usable diagnostic tools, along with training of field
health workers, to use them to screen population in remote areas for
common diseases, ailments, conditions.
Similarly, field usable medical care or therapeutic devices, used by
trained health workers, can improve medical care in such areas.
Linking these devices and health workers through smartphones to
telemedicine applications or social media platforms, with linkage to
doctors, can greatly improve remote diagnostics and care. This also
vastly increases value addition of the field health workers, and create
a career path based on continuous learning.
TouchHb,
developed by Biosense Technologies Pvt. Ltd., detects anaemia without a
needle poke, by identifying the presence of pallor in conjunctiva. The
easy to operate device enables field health workers to screen large
number of people in remote areas or slums.
Biosense
Technologies Pvt. Ltd;, with the help of WIN Foundation,
partnered with Sevak Foundation. Through this over 30,000 women and
children in remote areas of Gujarat have so far been tested for
haemoglobin and blood sugar, right in their villages.
Founder: Dr. Abhishek Sen, MBBS (Mumbai University), M.Tech.(Bio-medical engineering) from IIT Bombay. Biosense was acquired by Tulip Diagnostics in 2019.
Multispectral camera for timely detection of Cervical cancer
Cervical
cancer, with 1,20,000 cases per year, has a mortality rate in excess of
50% in the country. Current early detection requires the pap smear
test, followed with conventional biopsy or colposcopy guided
biopsy, requiring time and access to labs and doctors, limiting its
availability for remote population
Cerviscan,
developed by Sascan Meditech Pvt.Ltd, enables screening and early
detection of cervical cancers and biopsy guidance, using a
disruptive multimodal imaging technology. Health Workers can be trained
to operate the portable and easy to use Cerviscan device, and thus
enable mass screening in remote areas.
Founder and CEO : Dr. Subhash Narayan
WIN sponsored category award winner– NBEC’20 (National Bio
Entrepreneurship Competition, on behalf of Department of Biotechnology,
Government of India).
Neowarm Self Heating Blanket for Pre-term Babies
Parisodhana
has innovated an Air activated Self-heating blanket for transporting
pre-term babies from remote areas to hospitals in a safe manner. No
electricity or hot water or any external heat source is required. It
controls the ambient temperature for the baby at required level for
upto 8 hours and thus prevent hypothermia, which causes death of around
1 million pre-term babies every year.
With WIN Foundation support, the self heating blanket has been tested
in Gujarat, Telangana and Maharashtra, with over 200 trials.
Encouraging results and feedback from medical practitioners, in turn,
has resulted in support by others to fund more trials. Founders: Dr. Satyanarayan Kuchibatla and Dr. Ajay Karakoti
I
have been associated with Parisodhana since almost last 3 years
and we have done research on Neowarm. This is a very good simple
device to keep the babies warm, with lot
of application possibilities, specially in winter
season. Even the radiant warmer is not keeping them warm enough
for them and they start getting colder.
If
the baby gets hypothermic i.e cold, it does not use the glucose or the
milk that the baby takes in properly as it is
diverted to maintain the body temperature rather than giving heat.
This device gives the baby warmth and helps in improving the
babies’ weight. I see a lot of potential in the coming winter season we
look forward to lot more babies being saved with this simple device.
A Portable temperature-regulated carrier for transport of biologicals / vaccines
WHO
estimates that 50% of vaccines (25% for liquid vaccines) are wasted
before use, with cold chain being a major cause. Most vaccines require
2–8C during storage and transport. “Last-mile” immunization cold chain,
reliant on ice-based technologies, face problems of accidental freezing
and/or warming, and lack of temperature monitoring during transport.
Blackfrog has developed Emvólio- a portable, battery-powered
refrigeration device that will maintain any pre-set temperature for up
to 12 hours for last-mile transport of vaccines, with continuous
temperature monitoring, location tracking, charge-level indication, and
communication with headquarters for live tracking. This (i) reduces
risk of vaccine becoming ineffective or unsafe, (ii) reduces the
economic burden of wasted vaccines and (iii) optimizes human resources
in vaccine delivery
Founder: Mr. Mayur Shetty CEO
WIN sponsored category award winner– NBEC’20 (National Bio
Entrepreneurship Competition, on behalf of Department of Biotechnology,
Government of India)
Nutrition – Innovations
Improving
mother and child nutrition remains a major challenge in the country, in
spite of large scale efforts by governments and private charities, as
evidenced even in the latest NFHS 5 results, which show increased %
stunting and wasting in children in several states.
Women & Adolescent Girls Led Approach for Food & Nutrition Security in Urban Slums
The
greater effectiveness of Market creating interventions for social
impact than pure supply side approaches, have been studied and put
forth by late Prof. Clayton Christensen and his team. However, they are
difficult to implement and scale due to ground level difficulty of
simultaneously creating demand and supply, and then follow up
persistently to create a replicable model to scale.
Win Foundation’s ongoing project has a unique approach, involving
nearly 100% women in project leadership and execution, through a
simultaneous Push and Pull Approach.
Innovations applied within this model:
1. Child Nutrition Lab, at CTARA, IIT Bombay
- ChiNu develops nutritious recipes, localized in taste and ingredients
use, and also qualifies recipes for nutritional value with suggestions
for enhancement. These are made available to women SHGs and
microentrepreneurs.
2. Mother and Infant Child Nutrition Training, using 1st 1000 days
concept, developed by SMDT, with videos developed by Spoken Tutorial,
IIT Bombay
-
Unique program developed by Dr. Rupal Dalal, training field health
workers, on mother and child nutrition, with printed and video
material, enabling them to counsel mothers and track infant growth.
3. Women Micro-entrepreneurship training among poor communities, by REAL
- Special microentrepreneurship
development program evolved by REAL, for taking women from poor and
lower middle class background through various stages in developing them
as entrepreneurs.
Summary :
Innovations
for social impact, coupled with empowerment and training community
members is central to create long term sustainable social impact among
communities.
WIN supports NGOs, Institutions and Startups and created a
collaborative platform through its projects, to bring best in class
services to bring innovations at grassroots.
This enables us to
(i) take science to society: Usage of advanced technologies and processes for better work productivity and quality of life at village level.
(ii) take society to science: Inculcate scientific approach, knowledge, competency and habits in village communities.
OUTREACH ACTIVITIES
MOU with ITIC Incubator, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IITH)
The
MOU aims to jointly scout new technology / solutions for critical
technology in the domains of (i) Maternal Child health and (ii) Water
and sanitation, together, with support from IITH for incubation, labs
and seed funds, and support from WIN Foundation for field trials,
partnerships and domain experts.
Under
above, we jointly launched WIN Challenge - Track 1, in May-Jun’21,
focused on Child Growth and Health Monitoring, using AI /ML. The
selected start-ups will be sponsored by a WIN Fellowship for the
pre-incubation program at iTIC incubator at IIT Hyderabad.
MOU with Coastal Power Gujarat Ltd (subsidiary of Tata Power Ltd)
WIN
and Tata Power have already jointly supported startup like Tan90, for
modular supply chain products. The MOU aims to explore jointly
supporting more such grassroots innovations and social impact startups,
in our domains
Participation :
Mr.
Paresh Vora, Director India Operations, participated at the
FICCI-Vihara Asia Millennium Alliance Investor - Innovator meet, from
May 7th to May13th, in domains for health and WASH, as part of our
effort to seek relevant innovative startups in our domains.
Ms. Aishani Goswami, Project Associate, WIN Foundation gave a talk on
‘CityRehydrate – toolkit for sustainable water management’ on Friday Night Conversations(April 30, 2021), a platform hosted by Compartment S4 (https://win-f.org/CityRehydrate-ishani Goswami)
Ms. Aishani Goswami, Project Associate, WIN Foundation wrote an article titled ‘Connecting streams of water’ published in ‘Unmute’ dated June 25, 2021 which is a biannual print magazine. The theme of the magazine was ‘Songs of Participation’ (https://compartments4.com/unmute)
WIN SUPPORT - COVID RELIEF
WIN Foundation Contribution for Mahila Housing SEWA Trust for Support to vulnerable households during Covid 2nd Wave
COVID second wave had far more severe
impact as compared to the first wave last year. As most of the State
Government have imposed lockdown like restriction in all major Indian
cities, livelihood has been adversely impacted particularly of those
poor who are in informal sector and dependent on daily work. WIN
Foundation supported Mahila Housing Sewa Trust who got into
response mode to cater to the survival needs of urban poor and
homeless.
Edited by: Shanti Menon, Paresh Vora
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