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The MIT International Development Initiative (IDI) is pleased to announce the fourth annual Muhammad Yunus Innovation Challenge to Alleviate Poverty. Each year, the Yunus Challenge highlights a pressing and often overlooked need of the world’s poor and enables MIT students to develop solutions to address it through a variety of mechanisms, including the IDEAS competition, D-Lab, and Public Service Fellowships, Internships and Grants. The Challenge, named in honor of 2006 Nobel Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus, was initiated and is supported by MIT alumnus Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, supporter of the IDI, and benefactor of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

2010 Yunus Challenge: 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.

This year's Yunus 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 still 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.

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.

http://mit.edu/mitpsc/resources/internshipsandfellowships/index.html

http://mit.edu/mitpsc/resources/grants/index.html

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 the IDEAS coordinator at ideas-admin@mit.edu.

http://mit.edu/mitpsc/resources/ideas-competition/index.html

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.

Challenge Timeline

October 15 2009: Yunus Challenge Kickoff Dinner from 7:00 – 9:00pm, R&D Pub Lounge (Stata Center, 4th Floor)

October 23 2009: deadline to apply for IAP Fellowships and Internships related to the Challenge

IAP and Spring Semester TBA (see web.mit.edu/idi/yunus.shtml 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: http://libraries.mit.edu/accsk-us/