Promoting Clean Hands for Health and Prosperity
Millions of children die every year of diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory infections, which remain leading causes of preventable death, especially among the young in developing countries. Hands are a common vector for disease transmission, and the number of deaths could be cut dramatically if a simple method of cleaning hands, such as regular washing with soap, were widely promoted and practiced. In addition to the obvious health benefits, associated economic benefits, such as reducing the amount of school and work days missed, would accrue as well.

The 2010 Yunus Innovation Challenge calls for innovative sanitation solutions to encourage clean hands among those living in poverty. Solutions should be designed for implementation in communities living at or below the poverty level.

Background
Infectious diseases affect everyone. Yet a strong relationship exists between poverty, an unhygienic environment, and the number of episodes and severity of illness. The health cost of infectious diseases is tremendous and falls disproportionately on young children. Diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory infections are the leading causes of preventable death among children under five in developing countries, claiming the lives of more than 3.5 million children a year.

Hands are a common vector for disease transmission. Studies suggest that transforming good hand hygiene from an abstract idea into an automatic behavior performed in homes, schools and communities worldwide has the potential to save more lives than any single vaccine or medical intervention, interrupting the transmission path of disease and helping to prevent more than 1 million child deaths per year.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cleaning hands is "the single most important means of preventing the spread of infection," yet recent studies and reports indicate that lack of hand hygiene contributes significantly to disease transmission.

Despite interventions that make cleaning hands less costly, many barriers remain in place to widespread adoption of such practices. Challenges to overcome include:

  • inertia in adopting hygiene practices
  • cost and availability of resources
  • cultural barriers such as social norms and preferences

Key Considerations
There is a need to identify cost-effective ways to facilitate long-term behavioral change and technology adoption to encourage clean hands and improve hygiene. It is equally important to understand how households assess risk and how actionable health messages can be presented in different cultures and settings.

Improving sanitation may have the greatest impact where there is high population density, such as in urban areas, and where the entire community adopts the intervention, rather than single households. There is some evidence that inducing health or hygiene behavioral change may be especially difficult among the poorest groups.

The sanitation needs of the poor are wide and varied, and it is not expected that proposed solutions will address all issues surrounding disease transmission from unhygienic hands. However, Yunus Challenge solutions should address a particular need and fill it well. Participants are encouraged to work on a design with a specific community or region in mind as this can be helpful in identifying constraints and providing context.

Download the information flyer on the 2010 Yunus Innovation Challenge here

Useful Subject Reading
There are several additional sources of information (see bottom of page), but in particular participants are encouraged to read the following papers, which underscore that the real challenge is to overcome the behavioral hurdle of not cleaning hands regularly and designing a solution to this behavioral issue, rather than look at it only in technological terms of designing a low-cost, novel way to clean hands. The latter may be useful, but if it does not lead to greater hand cleaning by overcoming the behavioral barriers, as Dr. Celi noted in his talk at the Challenge kick off, it does not address the core issue of the 2010 Yunus Innovation Challenge.

Useful Video
This 10:25-minute Edge Video, "The Irony of Poverty", a talk given by Sendhil Mullainathan, makes for excellent watching on the same theme. A professor of economics at Harvard and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", Mullainathan conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is currently the Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, at Harvard University.

The Irony of Poverty

Supporting Initiatives
Opportunities are available for students who want to learn more about the challenge and the context in which a solution should operate. Students are encouraged to apply for Public Service fellowships, internships and grants that provide them with the opportunity to work on a potential program and with communities to develop a feasible solution which takes local context into account. For more information, please contact Alison Hynd at hynd@mit.edu.

For additional support in gathering information about the local context, customs and conditions of a specific community or country, participants may leverage the expertise of D-Lab teams who have local partners in more than 20 countries and who will be doing field work over the 2010 January IAP session in eight countries across three continents. For more information, please contact d-lab-trip-leaders@mit.edu.

Participants also may enter proposals into the IDEAS Competition, where two special awards have been created to provide winning teams with funding to pursue their ideas. For more information, please contact Samantha Cooper at coopers@mit.edu.

IDEAS Competition Criteria
The Yunus Challenge IDEAS Award for 2010 will be given to participants who create an innovative solution that solves as many of the problems as possible surrounding disease transmission from unhygienic hands for those living in poverty.

As the challenge focuses on encouraging clean hands and improving hygiene among the world's poorest populations, solutions should aim for a price point that makes intervention accessible to target communities (who are located for the most part in low-income nations with poor infrastructure) and allows for dissemination on a large-scale.

As with all IDEAS awards, innovation, feasibility and impact will be important criteria in judging. Specific issues to address include, but should not necessarily be limited to:

  • Affordability
  • Acceptability within the community (i.e., likelihood of adoption)
  • Health impact
  • Environmental impact
  • Scalabity

Credit will be given for supporting rationale regarding how the solution will directly address the issues faced. For example, this rationale could include why the team decided to focus particular attention on solving one aspect of the challenge. However, if a team decides that another factor is equally significant, supporting evidence for this factor also should be provided.

While not required, the solution may involve a physical device. The system should be designed to operate in conditions prevalent in poor households and communities where basic sanitation is limited. Again, participants are encouraged to work on a design with a specific community or region in mind as this can be helpful in identifying constraints and providing context.

Competition Timeline

  • October 15, 2009: Yunus Challenge Kickoff from 7:00 to 9:00pm, R&D Pub Lounge (Stata Center, 4th Floor)
  • IAP and Spring Semester events to be announced (please check this page again later for more information)

Resources
A sampling of resources for participants about health and hygiene follows.

For assistance in finding additional resources specific to your project, please contact an MIT librarian.

For more information on the 2010 Yunus Innovation Challenge, please contact Geoff Groesbeck at gapg@mit.edu.