Vodafone Americas Foundation Blog

How Silicon Valley’s Talent Wars Are Killing Its Nonprofits

Bay Area nonprofits are being priced out of the Valley as salaries and overhead costs continue to skyrocket

When you imagine a typical nonprofit, you may picture a soup kitchen, a community center, or a homeless shelter. While such services still exist, many nonprofits now design apps, build websites, and design digital tools that help deliver social programs and services to those in need.

“A lot of organizations that were previously not integrating technology into their programs have quickly realized that you can’t do work in the social sector or the public health sector without embracing technology, because it’s cost effective and impactful,” says Bhupendra Sheoran, the executive director of Youth Tech Health (YTH), a San Francisco Bay Area-based nonprofit organization. “Almost every organization that we work with has some level of technology integration in their organization and their programs,” he adds.

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WIP Winner MobileODT Brings Cervical Cancer Screenings to Global Communities

Mobile ODT deviceIn 2014, MobileODT won first prize in the Vodafone Americas Foundation’s Wireless Innovation Project for its smartphone-based technology that converts the camera of the phone into a device capable of providing the evidence clinicians need to catch cancer before it develops. With its WIP prize, MobileODT’s first priority was to use its technology to fight cervical cancer.

Cervical cancer is responsible for the deaths of more than 270,000 people annually, about 85 percent of whom live in low- or middle-income countries, and it is a leading cause of death for women in developing nations. More →

Vodafone Employees Leverage Technology for Good with Kiva

KivaThe Vodafone Americas Foundation is excited to announce the launch of a new program with Kiva, a non-profit organization that allows people to lend money through an online platform to low-income entrepreneurs and students in over 80 countries. With this new program, the Foundation is providing a grant to Kiva to give Vodafone employees the opportunity to direct a loan to an entrepreneur or project of their choice through the Kiva platform.

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Vodafone Americas Foundation and UN Global Pulse to Embark on Study on State of Mobile Data for Social Impact

Global PulseUnited Nations Global Pulse will partner with the Vodafone Americas Foundation to embark on a several month study to evaluate the state of mobile data for social impact.

Consultations begin today with a panel discussion among industry experts on “data for development” at this year’s GSMA Mobile 360 – Africa conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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Vodafone Celebrates International Women’s Week

This week mark’s International Women’s Week, a global week to celebrate the economic, political, and social achievements of women. It’s a time to understand the road that women have traveled to try to gain equality rights throughout the world, but it is also a time to discuss the fact that there is still work to be done. In fact, the World Economic Forum predicts that a slowdown in the already glacial pace of progress meant the gender gap wouldn’t close entirely until 2133.

Vodafone Americas is committed to helping close the gender gap and is working with the Vodafone Americas Foundation to celebrate women across the country. This week, there will be a number of initiatives for Vodafone employees to get involved to discuss and focus on women’s equality.

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Calling all Innovators! Deadline Approaching – Wireless Innovation Project Applications Close Feb. 27th

2016 is well underway and we’re getting closer to finding our winners for this year’s Wireless Innovation Project (WIP). Since launching in 2009, the Wireless Innovation Project has awarded $4.2 million to unique solutions made to help address critical issues around the world with a focus on helping people in the most vulnerable areas. This year will be no different! With the deadline quickly approaching on February 27th, we wanted to send a reminder to all who wish to enter and also highlight a few past WIP winners.

Organizations such as US universities, NGOs and entrepreneurs with nonprofit partners can enter for the Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Project competition 2016. Entries must be submitted by February 27th, 2016. For more details visit the Wireless Innovation Project (WIP)

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What do toilets text when they are all alone?

Vodafone Americas Foundation funds connected toilet project which could help 2.5bn people access better sanitation

cody_finke_303x303I didn’t start out to become the creator of a texting toilet, but my team’s invention, with the Vodafone Americas Foundation’s help, will make a major contribution to solving one of the world’s biggest development challenges.

About 2.5 billion people—around half the people in the developing world—do not use an improved sanitation facility according to the United Nations.

Improved sanitation is not the inside toilet you and I are used to, but covers facilities as basic as a pit latrine covered by a slab. This is a major problem with a wide-ranging impact on health, environment and livelihoods.

A few years ago I joined a project to tackle that problem by creating a low cost, solar-powered wastewater treatment and recycling system for developing countries. The system is an electrochemical reactor that converts human waste into disinfected water. More →

A Mobile Health Kit to Detect Pulmonary Disease

My advisor, Dr. Rich Fletcher, and I began our investigation of pulmonary diseases last fall. We learned that these diseases are significant causes of morbidity and mortality and the burden is mostly focused on the developing world. However, the standard techniques for diagnosing these diseases require expensive machines and well-trained technicians, both of which can be lacking in resource-poor settings. As a result, patients are misdiagnosed and do not receive the treatment they need. Rich and I realized that if we combined our skillsets (Dr. Fletcher is an expert in developing low-cost sensors that interface with mobile phones and I am a machine learning researcher interested in developing diagnostic tools), we could develop an inexpensive, portable diagnostic tool kit that could help doctors and health workers provide more accurate diagnoses of pulmonary diseases. More →

Nerves and the Finalist WIP Presentation Day

Shortly after submitting our initial application for the WIP, I was called off to India to repair one of our waste water treatment systems that we had been field testing for a year in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation Park in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. My WIP teammate Clement Cid had made many such trips as well. This time, a pump was not working and because logistics and training are complicated and expensive in the developing world, it was not getting fixed. This is exactly the problem that I had written about in our WIP application, and exactly the reason why I was days late in responding to June Sugiyama the director of the Foundation’s email notifying us that we had been selected as finalists! More →