Cholera is a preventable and easily treatable disease, but it presents a huge threat in developing countries—every year, there are between 1.3 and 4 million cases worldwide, resulting in up to 143,000 deaths. Sadly, nearly 1.8 billion people around the world drink water that can carry the cholera bacterium. Now two female researchers, Jacqueline Linnes and Tamara Kinzer-Ursem have developed a smartphone-based platform to help detect disease pathogens before they spread. PathVis is a mobile tool that puts a lab in the palm of your hand.

In her 10 years as director of the Vodafone Americas Foundation, June Sugiyama has inadvertently become an expert in developing challenges.  Since 2009, the foundation has been running the Wireless Innovation Challenge, which seeks innovative ideas using wireless-related technology to address social issues around the world.  Years of leading the challenge have helped Sugiyama to refine ideas of what works in creating disruption to address social and other issues affecting developing countries.

At an event hosted at Vodafone, GSMA released The State of Mobile Data for Social Good Report, a collaboration between UN Global Pulse, an innovation initiative of the United Nations, and the GSMA. Mobile network data (mobile big data) holds great promise as a transformative resource for social good.

Benetech, the leading software for social good nonprofit, today announced a partnership with United Ways of California and United Way Bay Area to design a data system that allows for more accurate, timely, and cost-effective use of health and human services resource directory data. The partnership paves the way for greater access to health and human services data for Bay Area residents as well as a replicable model for deployment across California, the United States, and other service sectors.

The Vodafone Americas Foundation today announced the winners of its ninth annual Wireless Innovation Project (WIP), a competition for potential life-changing connected innovations addressing critical issues facing the world today. The $300,000 first place prize was awarded to PathVis. The second place prize of $200,000 was awarded to WIPER, and the third place prize of $100,000 was awarded to DreamSave.

For Nithya Ramanathan, founding a non-profit but running it like a tech company was a means to do the most good possible and finding a little redemption along the way.

Annual program, which has helped scale life-changing innovations including vaccine monitoring and mobile microscopes and more, to award $600,000 in prize money to new, promising solutions.

Mobile holds the key to bringing banking to the unbanked, healthcare to rural areas and opportunities for women who may otherwise be hard to reach. Realizing the full potential of mobile technologies and using it for the good of the world is what brings June Sugiyama to work every day.

With its parent corporation ranked as one of the top telecom companies in the world, Vodafone Americas Foundation’s focus is a natural fit: “We support projects that use technology for social impact,” says June Sugiyama, the foundation’s director.

The device senses changes in the cervix and can give a warning about preterm births—before contractions start.