LIRNEasia » Gates

Bill Gates on inclusive innovation

Rohan Samarajiva — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 05:56:25 +0000

In a recent in-house piece I did on LIRNEasia’s work on inclusive innovation with emphasis on agriculture, I concluded that inclusive development occurs when “the necessary condition of high, sustained growth above 7 percent year-on-year and the sufficient condition of a majority of the country’s work force being engaged in high-growth sectors are satisfied.” Innovations that contribute to inclusive development qualified as inclusive.

In most developing countries, a high proportion of the work force is engaged in agriculture. Therefore, one cannot envisage inclusive development occurring without agriculture being transformed from a laggard sector to a leading growth sector. In this context, Bill Gates’s thinking on innovation is highly relevant to any discussion of inclusive innovation:

We can help poor farmers sustainably increase their productivity so they can feed themselves and their families. By doing so, they will contribute to global food security. But that will happen only if we prioritize agricultural innovation.

Gates concludes a highly informed and thought-provoking discussion on problems in agricultural livelihoods and solutions, thus:

When I talk about innovation, it can be abstract for some people. But the direct link between the challenges Christina faces when her crop is destroyed and the solutions that Dr. Ndunguru is working on every day makes it very concrete. Disease-resistant cassava is an answer to Christina’s prayers, and I look forward to the day when Dr. Ndunguru’s work is done and I can go back to Tanzania and see Christina’s field thick with healthy cassava plants. That is why I say that innovation has been and will continue to be the key to improving the world.

Social entrepreneurship, the aftertaste of village phones and Yunus’ plans for the future

Rohan Samarajiva — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:58:24 +0000

The Grameen village phone ladies are slowly going out of business but Davos discussion still refers on the same model.

Many Are Already at Work on Fulfilling Gatess Vision – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog

Last week Mr. Gates called on the executives of the largest corporations to add social entrepreneurship to their agenda, a leopard-spot-altering exercise at best. However, in challenging his compatriots, one of the experiments he overlooked was Mr. Yunus’s stunning success at Grameen Phone in Bangladesh, an effort he has pioneered during the past decade in partnership with Telenor, a Norwegian wireless carrier.

Intended as an experiment to extend wireless communications networks to the world’s poorest people, the program has become a remarkable success on multiple levels. Not only did it create a class of “phone ladies” who brought wealth into village communities, it has grown quickly enough and been profitable enough that Mr. Yunus said this week in Davos that Telenor had decided to break its original promise to his organization and refused to turn over control to allow the program to be run on a not-for-profit basis.

Colloquium on Real-Time Biosurveillance For Early Warnings in Sri Lanka

Tahani Iqbal — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 11:33:43 +0000

Assume a scenario where among the chief complaint strings of two unrelated patients in the same District on the same date there was a mention of bloody stools in pediatric cases. The multiple mentions of “bloody stools” or “pediatric” might not be surprising, but the tying together of these two factors, given matching geographic locations and timings of reporting, is sufficiently rare that seeing only two such cases is of interest. This was precisely the evidence that was the first noticeable signal of the tragic Walkerton, Canada, waterborne bacterial gastroenteritis outbreak caused by contamination of tap water in May 2000. That weak signal was spotted by an astute physician, not by a surveillance system. Reliable automated detection of such signals in multivariate data requires new analytic approaches.

The socioeconomic see the key problem is not software but accurate and timely entry of data by Medical Practitioners. Hence the project will extend the user interfacing to the last mile using information communication technology (ICT) networks that already span the island of Sri Lanka. They would be the GSM and CDMA Wireless Local Loop (WLL) markets that are far beyond the fixed phone market, it is intuitive to introduce WLL applications opposed to traditional personal computer applications in order to increase the early detection and warning of diseases outbreaks in Sri Lanka.

The proposed Biosurveillance project is an extension of the Last-Mile HazInfo project. The intent of this colloquium is to validate the research and objectives of the Biosurveillance project proposal.

The presentation Nuwan is making can be downloaded HERE

Skype participants: Dr Artur Dubrawski (AutonLabs), Dr Gordon Gow (University of Alberta) and Shanmugarajah

Nuwan: 80% of the Haz-Info project completed.
The research question is: Can Biosurveillance Algorithms coupled with Wireless Local Loop Network Applications increase the early detection and warning of Communicable diseases in Sri Lanka?

Biosurveillance as defined by the Ministry of Health. WLL includes GSM and CDMA Wireless Local Loop (WLL).

To be more specific, we need to look at reliability of WLL ICTs in communicating health information, reliability of Biosurveillance Algorithms, the contribution of organizational level, gender specific responses and the degree of integration of ICTs.

DG: Is this proposal geared towards IDRC and if it is going to be for the Gates foundation?

Nuwan: That is undecided so far.

The surveillance and alerting system was described, step by step as seen in Slide 7 of the presentation.

DrDubrawski: Need for feedback from MoH at 9.

RS: It wont make sense to get feedback after 9. Step 7 would be the feedback point.

Nuwan: Message verficiation and feedback takes place at 7 anyways.

Slide 9: The data algorithms to be used will be What’s Strange About Recent Events (WSARE 3.0), SpatialScan and TIPMON.

For WLL data exchange, we will be making use of GSM mobile phones and CDMA fixed phones.

Examples of patterns that can be detected using this system: diarrhea cases among children, respiratory syndrome cases among females, Botulinic syndrome cases and number of wrist injuries in a Base Hospital, etc.

Checking with archived records (last year’s record) and recent records (yesterday’s patient records) with current records (today’s information) is a costly affair.

The WSARE software obtains recent and baseline datasets, searches for rules, determines the significance level of best scoring rule, and reports all rules that are highly significant.

The SpatialScan statistics looks for over densities – the regions where counts are significantly higher than expected, given the underlying population.

Dr Dubrawski: The SpatialScan system collects data from pharamcists on drug purchases on a daily basis. This can be indicative of any impending outbreaks of disease.

The NoisyCopy model was built for the USDA for screening possible food complaints. Basically, the consumers submit complaints through phone interface and the system scans the complaints for similarities. If there are similarities, this may indicate that the product problem has generated by the same underlying process.

Nuwan explained the research matrix as described in slide 23.

Slide 24 – Project Task Matrix
EPID, Sarvodaya, Micro-image, AutonLab, Vanguard, and LIRNEasia will be partners in this project. Tasks have been allocated for each partner.

Slide 25 – Next steps
Proposal to be completed by November 2006.

We hope to seek $200,000 from the Gates Foundation or IDRC.

Target kick-off date March 2007.