Turnstyle on Wednesday, Jun. 20th
The founders of ESSMART, who won this month’s Dell Social Innovation Challenge, seem to be poising themselves to be the Sears Roebuck of the developing world. The idea is simple: empower the fourteen million shop owners in India through a digital distribution network so they can purchase consumer products that can make life easier for India’s 192 million household rural population. Diana Jue and Jackie Stenson have already run a successful pilot program with two rural shop owners who sold out of 17 products in one week. Jue will launch operations this summer in India, and plans to sign up 65 retail shops by year’s end.
Essmart’s $50,000 in winnings will help them rent warehouse space, hire sales agents, and purchase inventory to move into stores.
Independent producer Deepa Donde talked to Stenson about her goals for Essmart. Duane Allen Humeyestewa engineered the interview.
(Disclosure: Donde has been both a board member and a judge for the Dell Social Innovation Challenge).
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Turnstyle on Wednesday, Jun. 20th
Recently, the Dell Social Innovation Challenge announced the winner of the penultimate competition for young social entrepreneurs.
Suzi Sosa is the executive director of the Challenge. Independent producer Deepa Donde (with sound engineer Duane Allen Humeyestewa) spoke with Sosa about her belief that entrepreneurship is possible for all kinds of people, and is the solution to the world’s biggest problems.
(Disclosure: Donde has been both a board member and a judge for the Dell Social Innovation Challenge).
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Turnstyle on Wednesday, Jun. 20th
The college students who entered this month’s Dell Social Innovation Challenge are firmly committed to solving the world’s most pressing problems through creative, sustainable business models. More than 1,700 student groups submitted projects in hopes of winning the $50,000 grand prize and the chance to work with top mentors.
The five finalists represent a new possible future for the global economy, one in which the world’s poorest populations are empowered to determine the well-being of their own communities. The problems: getting essential, life-saving products to remote Indian villages; distributing vaccines to millions of underserved people; turning human waste into mobile energy; shutting down the largest mass water poisoning on the planet by removing arsenic from water in Bangladesh; getting the best teachers in remote parts of the developing world to schools through DVD courses. These finalists had the answers.
The poised, well-prepared students shared staggering statistics that shed light on the immediate, urgent needs that their projects would respond to.
In this interview for Turnstyle partner site Youth Radio, independent producer Deepa Donde spoke with Peter Matheu of Nanoly, the third prize winner, which received a $10,000 award as well as a $1,000 Audience Choice Award.
What has kept Nanoly’s founders up at night is finding a way to transport vaccines to the most isolated Third World communities to prevent diseases from harming or killing children. The statistics are staggering: at least two million people die each year from vaccine-preventable diseases. Nanoly founders are using their engineering and science backgrounds to address the crisis. These students have capitalized on a highly advanced scientific technology and have refined a polymer which preserves vaccines for 30 days. The polymer can then be activated by light which then releases the vaccines for immediate use. Why is this revolutionary? No more refrigeration—the primary obstacle for delivering vaccines.
Duane Allen Humeyestewa engineered this interview.
(Disclosure: Donde has been both a board member and a judge for the Dell Social Innovation Challenge).
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