USAID ANNOUNCES WINNERS IN DEVELOPMENT 2.0 CHALLENGE

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) announced three mobile innovation winners, selected from 115 applicants, in its Development 2.0 Challenge. The objective of the competition was to encourage development of low-cost, high development impact services.

The first place winner was RapidSMS Child Malnutrition Surveillance, a service that enables health practitioners in Malawi to share and track children's nutritional information automatically at the touch of a cell phone button, significantly supporting efforts to enhance children's health and vastly reducing the time necessary to detect famines. Kirsten Bokenkamp, a graduate student at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), represented the group as three of her teammates built the project in Malawi.

ClickDiagnostics, one of two second place finishers, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provides a mobile technology-based infrastructure to connect community-based health-workers to remote medical specialists.

Ushahidi, the other second place finisher, is a platform that crowdsources crisis information, allowing anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form. The system was originally developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi's roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. -Stuart Whitaker