Seed for Change Competition: Highlights Report

COMPETITION

SEED FOR CHANGE

2018-19 HIGHLIGHTS The Seed for Change Program aims to develop a vibrant ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship in India and Pakistan through an annual competition.

Cover Credit: Green Screen; photo by Gina Ciancone

Ciancone and team's “Green Screen” is a tool to address air pollution and extreme heat.

TABLE OF CONTENTS About Seed for Change

05

Seed for Change Projects

Gramhal (2019)

06

Riskboard (2019)

08

Meet (2019)

10

Green Screen (2018)

12

Umbulizer (2018)

14

Pre-Texts (2018)

14

Parivartan (2018)

15

Sakhi (2017)

16

Barakat Bundle (2017)

16

Anantara (2017)

17

GoMango (2016)

18

Torr Energy (2016)

18

The Craftsmen (2016)

19

KP Balaraj and Sumir Chadha with the GoMango team members and the judging panel at the 2016 Seed For Change competition finale.

4

The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

SEED FOR CHANGE COMPETITION The Seed for Change Program aims to develop a vibrant ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship in India and Pakistan through an annual competition run by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, in which grant prizes are awarded to interdisciplinary student projects that positively impact societal, economic, and environmental issues in India and Pakistan. The Seed for Change competition is made possible by a grant from KP Balaraj, MBA ’97, and Sumir Chadha, MBA ‘97.

2018-19 Seed for Change Report

5

GRAMHAL

Breaking the Cycle of Debt for India’s Farmers

Gramhal is a social enterprise that builds smallholder farmers’ agency and increases their income by unlocking postharvest services of storage, credit, and market linkage via a digital platform.

2019 WINNER INDIA

6

Every 30 minutes, a farmer in India commits suicide. That haunting fact is the inspiration behind a new social enterprise and digital platform called Gramhal, which will streamline the work of smallholder farmers in India while increasing their income. Co-founders Vikas Birhma, originally from a village in Northern India, and Pankaj Mahalle, from a small village in Central India, met and became friends at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. “We both had lived experiences of agrarian hardships and poverty, which became a strong undercurrent of our friendship,” Birhma said.

Together, the two created Gramhal in 2018, which Birhma describes as “an agricultural ecosystem where farming communities have the agency to earn a sustainable livelihood.”

For the past year, it has been incubated at the Social Innovation and Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School. Birhma leads the strategy, sales, and fundraising for the enterprise. Mahalle heads farmers’ interface at Gramhal, encompassing mobilization, relationship-building, and onboarding of farmers onto the platform. They are joined by a team of volunteers from a spectrum of disciplines.

Gramhal came in first place in the Mittal Institute’s 2019 Seed for Change competition, earning a $40,000 grant to develop their next steps. “In the next year, the funding from Seed for Change will help us build a digital platform and undertake a pilot with 15,000 farmers in Yavatmal, Maharashtra,” Birhma said.

The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

After the competition, we sat down with Vikas Birhma to learn more about Gramhal.

What is Gramhal?

Gramhal is a social enterprise that builds smallholder farmers’ agency and increases their income by unlocking post-harvest services of storage, credit, and market linkage via a digital platform. The majority of smallholder farmers in India are involved in sustenance farming of food grains using informal credit. The urgent need for cash during the harvesting season requires these farmers to quickly sell their produce without waiting for a favorable price. The lack of access to storage and the need to repay credit further intensify the situation. Thus, most farmers end up distress selling at a throwaway price. This has pushed farmers into a vicious debt cycle, leading to one farmer suicide every half an hour.

Gramhal addresses this issue by providing farmers with a bundle of post-harvest services, including access to storage, credit, and buyers via a digital platform. The platform enables farmers to store their produce in our partner warehouse. Our partner bank extends credit to the farmer by taking stored produce as collateral. The credit eases the farmers’ cash flow and provides farmers with the agency to wait for a favorable market condition. Furthermore, receiving daily price information via SMS allows farmers to decide when to sell their produce, and they can easily initiate a sale by sending an SMS to Gramhal.

Thus, we build an ecosystem for farmers

that empowers them to decide when to sell, whom to sell to, and at what price. Through this model, we aspire to improve the lives of more than 600 million people in India who are directly dependent on agriculture. We envision a world where no farmer has to die to feed the planet.

Our low-tech platform based on SMS communication provides a massive opportunity for reach and scale of digital intervention. In India, 88% of households own mobile phones, however, the literacy level in rural India is only 71%. Hence, one logistical challenge would be to reach non-literate farmers. In the next two years, we hope to solve this by developing an interactive voice response system for non-literate farmers to access our services.

What are the challenges smallholder farmers face in India?

Smallholder farmers in India face many challenges. Among them, there are three most critical issues that have pushed them into a debt spiral and destitution: 1.

2.

3.

Gramhal’s business model is rooted in a strong social impact.

The short run: Gramhal will increase the farmers’ income. The option of storing harvest at the warehouse and the access to credit will provide farmers with an opportunity to harness seasonal price increase. Furthermore, a direct link with the end-buyer will shift price gains from intermediaries to farmers. Price gains along these two-dimensions will increase the income of the farmers by more than 40%.

The medium run: Gramhal will build the farmers’ agency. The access to postharvest credit will build farmers’ agency to avoid distress selling. Also, our platform will automatically gather the most authentic farmlevel data on quality, quantity, yield, price, debt, and income. This data will be used to provide personalized extension services to farmers.

The long run: Gramhal will stimulate rural job opportunities. India has a gap of 27 million

metric tons in agriculture warehousing. Our platform will generate the demand to fill this gap. Rural entrepreneurs and farmers’ cooperatives will emerge to open small-scale warehouses at the village level. This will create a demand for a semi-skilled workforce in rural areas, creating millions of rural jobs.

What does the future look like for Gramhal?

In the next three years, Gramhal will scale in five districts adjacent to Yavatmal. Gramhal has close relationships with farmers’ cooperatives and grassroots organizations in our project location. As we scale, we will partner with these institutions to onboard farmers onto the platform and deliver critical services of quality inspection, grading, and transport pooling at the village level itself.

Team Vikas Birhma, MPP ‘19 Pankaj Mahalle, Tata Institute of Social Science, Mumbai

Credit comes at a high interest rate from intermediaries. Formal banks do not extend credit to smallholder farmers, because most of them do not have land ownership. Thus, they are dependent on informal credit from intermediaries, who charge an interest rate between 40% to 120%.

Low harvest price around the harvesting season.

Uneven cash flow. Their income is seasonal, however, their expenditure is on daily terms. This decreases their agency to make a strategic decision, like holding the harvest to wait for a better price.

What do you foresee as the social impact of Gramhal in India?

Vikas Birhma at the final round of the Seed for Change competition in April 2019.

2018-19 Seed for Change Report

7

RISKBOARD

Using Tech and Social Media to Protect Human Rights Riskboard, a runner-up, in the 2019 Seed for Change Competition, is an app in development by four Harvard students that will harness online data via social media and open source media data sites to monitor political risk and human rights abuses in India.

Riskboard is an app in development that will harness online data via social media and open source media data sites to monitor political risk and human rights abuses in India.

2019 RUNNER–UP INDIA

8

The teammates come from multidisciplinary backgrounds. "We’ve tried to marry our human rights, business, and political risk expertise with machine learning,” said Parthiban. With the grant from the Seed for Change competition, the team will begin a more in-depth technical development of the Riskboard app. “We need to build up the tool, so a lot of the funds will go toward development to help us build a good prototype that we can start piloting out. Then, the team can go on-the-ground and see these issues face-to-face,” said Parthiban.

What is Riskboard?

Riskboard began in a class at the Harvard Business School with Professor Tarun Khanna. Parthiban, inspired by his prior volunteer efforts to help resolve the refugee and human trafficking crises in his home state of Texas, sought to combine this passion with his love for the high-tech sector. “One of the first assignments that we had was to define a large problem that affects a third-world country, and then solve it,” said Parthiban.

His team took on the problem of forced labor, ultimately pivoting to human rights and political risk analysis.

After the class ended, Parthiban continued

The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

the project, and pulled in some new members to the group. With the help of fellow student Arjun Bisen and his expertise in political risk analysis across nations, the team came up with a plan to use technology to monitor risks to human rights around the world. “I thought, ‘what if we could automate the work of diplomacy?’ We could empower other people to build a framework around the political drivers of human rights risk, and perform direct detection early on,” said Bisen.

The team had discovered a powerful new way to enter the field. “The overall problem with the human trafficking industry is that there’s a huge demand for it, so we tried to focus on the corporate side of demand, where these companies are driven by profits and economic factors — so they have to source from third parties and can’t monitor who they’re employing,” said Parthiban. “You have to deal with so much demand created by the economics of the industry because there are no protections in those areas and companies don’t really know what’s going on.

So, we felt that by empowering organizations to understand their supply chains and clean them up, it will actually reduce demand.”

Using open source media data sites like GDELT, the team can pull information from media reports around the world, across multiple languages. “That’s a firehose of data, and it’s updated on a pretty regular basis,” said Pleban. The team will also use social media to gather their reports. They can then funnel this information into the app they’re developing, which will provide corporations

live updates about locations all over the world and give these organizations a way to be more transparent. But they’re not stopping at corporations — they also want to work with NGOs to improve humanitarian efforts and reporting, while giving these groups the power to hold corporations accountable and create systemic-wide change.

With so much data today from third world countries and the adoption of smart phones higher than ever, the team learned from their meetings with over 40 corporations and NGOs that these organizations are dealing with too much information. “They don’t know what’s happening in the deep-level supplychain, they don’t know what they can do about it, and they don’t have context behind these instances. For example, it could help them understand if they want to close a plant or not due to unrest — if they had more information and understood the context, they could make a better decision, save money, help the community, and even save lives,” said Parthiban.

How does it work?

see when something was trending and if there was any corporate action then, so companies can see how other organizations reacted to something,” said Parthiban.

Though India is the first stop on the list, the team envisions that Riskboard can someday be used on an international scale. “We’ll start in India, but we definitely want to go global,” said Parthiban. “With machine learning, hopefully we can create a predictive model.

One day, you’ll be able to predict where it might be high risk, someone will be able to avoid something dangerous, and NGOs will be able to write better reports.”

What are its potential impacts?

want to and to be able to drive demand for that by paying a premium for ethically-sourced products,” said Parthiban. “I think our tool is an enabler of fair-trade transactions. We want to see a world where every transaction is clean and ethical.” “What we’ve learned is that just throwing money and technology at the problem doesn’t help,” said Parthiban. Their tool aims to go beyond that — to empower corporations, NGOs, and the “good guys” to balance the scales.

Team Pradeepan Parthiban, ALM ‘19 Arjun Bisen, MPP ‘19 Ryan Jiang ‘20 Luka Caratsch, University of St. Gallen

Once the app goes live, the Riskboard team envisions numerous potential positive impacts related to politics, economics, and ethics. “We want to increase transparency and accountability on the corporate side. I think that has a lot of economic implications: we want people to be paid fair wages in these supply chains, we want the consumers to

All of this context will be provided within the Riskboard app, which will refresh live.

Unlike many reports created by NGOs every six months or a year, it will update within 5–15 minutes. “A lot of organizations are getting their information from consultancies, embassies, or risk companies, but the information they get is periodic. The day they get it, it may already be outdated,” Parthiban said. “Having immediacy of information is a big plus — it’s a game-changer.”

The team described the app and its upcoming dashboard features, including a social graph and historical data about locations. It will track social media primarily in local languages and contexts, while pulling themes, stakeholders, origin, timing, and other information from recent articles to create a map that connects everything. “We could look back in time and The four members of the Riskboard team wait for the decision at the Seed for Change competition.

From right to left: Ori Pleban, Arjun Bisen, Ryan Jiang, and Pradeepan Parthiban.

2018-19 Seed for Change Report

9

MEET

Rebuilding Trust in India’s Job Market “The pathway from education to employment for Indian youth is, simply put, failing them,” says Vish Srivastava, co-founder of India’s newest employment app, Meet. Alongside co-founder Ankit Chugh, the two have built a platform to address the difficulties that India’s job market presents, with 30% of Indians aged 15-29 either unemployed or not enrolled in an educational institution or skills training program.

Meet is an employment app for India that connects verified employers and job-seekers, providing both with trusted information, such as reviews, job openings, and profiles to support better matching.

2019 RUNNER–UP INDIA

With the grant provided by the Seed for Change competition, the Meet team will renew their partnership with a local software development firm in Lucknow to continue building the product. “As we scale up our team and user base, our technology platform’s costs are also increasing, which this grant will help with. We depend on a variety of technologies to run Meet, including Heroku, G Suite, Google Maps, Github, and Intercom,” says Vish Srivastava.

Below, Srivastava explains what Meet is, the inspiration behind it, and its potential impacts on India’s job market.

What is Meet?

Meet is an employment app that connects verified employers and job-seekers, providing both with trusted information, such as reviews, job openings, and profiles to support better matching. We are building this product in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh (UP), India in partnership with the NGO Medha to launch a pilot, test the hypothesis, and eventually scale this employment platform to have large-

10 The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

scale impact in UP. We launched our pilot in April 2019 and now have over 100 active pilot users, with whom we engage on a weekly basis to get their feedback and continue to iterate on the Meet product.

This platform is differentiated from its competition in two fundamental ways: Verification: In conducting research with job seekers in Lucknow, we learned that existing job boards like Naukri and Babajobs are plagued with fraud and misinformation. To avoid falling into the same trap, Meet staff verify every review and job posting submitted to the platform, and conduct extensive vetting of both employers and job-seekers before they are allowed to become active users on the platform. Meet’s company profile information, reviews, and job postings can be trusted.

Youth-oriented: Meet has been meticulously tailored to its target audience. While LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other similar platforms are in English and create generalized features for their global audience, Meet is written in Hinglish (the preferred language of communication amongst youth in UP, largely driven by new mediums such as WhatsApp) and has been co-designed with the youth themselves. Furthermore, specific design decisions, like which categories are used for reviews and the types of filters used to discover employers, have been made specifically for youth in UP. Chris Turillo and Rohit Nayak, Co-Founder

and VP Partnerships of Medha, respectively, are our active advisors, and help us shape the company, connect us to Medha’s data when appropriate, and provide their rich insights into the problems we’re working to solve. In the last month we have hired our customer support, content management, and operations teams. We are proud to have built a passionate team of five employees in Lucknow, four of which are women. We are fortunate to have several additional advisors as we build and scale Meet, including Jim Larson (Partner at BCG), Shalu Umapathy (Managing Director at IDEO.org), Jock Herron (Harvard GSD), Krzysztof Gajos (Harvard SEAS), and Emmerich Davies (Harvard GSE).

Why create this app?

The challenges in the job market for youth in India are significant. There is a profound misalignment between the education and employment systems in India and the needs of its youth. According to the OECD, 30% of people aged 15-29 in India are not in employment, education, or training, and according to Aspiring Minds, 47% of India’s graduates are not considered employable in the knowledge economy. The pathway from education to employment for Indian youth is, simply put, failing them.

founder Chris Turillo. This resulted in a fruitful partnership in which we have conducted several rounds of research in Lucknow and have built and launched our company.

One of our early inspirations for Meet was sparked from a conversation with a man named Krishna, a retail floor associate at an apparel store in a large mall in Lucknow. He shared with us that all of the workers in the mall meet for chai every day and exchange information about their salaries and working conditions. Armed with this information, all of the workers were able to negotiate better pay and switch jobs to a different store if it was a better fit.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to recreate this chai break on an online platform that allows jobseekers and employees to share information and help each other? Krishna’s story inspired the Meet logo: a chai cup to represent the free exchange of information to benefit all.

What are its potential impacts?

We believe Meet has the potential to drive significant impact in the labor markets of tier II/III Indian cities. Our theory of change is that a free and transparent flow of information will: lead to improved labor practices, increased incomes, and better job satisfaction; democratize information for historically disadvantaged groups (e.g., along gender and socioeconomic segments); create and sustain social connections by enabling peers to share mutually-beneficial information.

Together, Srivastava and Chugh are breaking down barriers in the job market commonly faced by India’s youth, looking to bring transparency and accuracy to an app that will hopefully increase trust for both job seekers and employers.

Team Vish Srivastava, MDE ‘19 Ankit Chugh, Medha

Paradoxically, the picture is not much better for employers. ManpowerGroup says that 56% of worldwide employers report talent shortages. And even when they can fill their open positions, they face difficulties retaining employees, and experience very high employee attrition rates. These statistics paint a dire picture and represent a failure of the job market for both job seekers and employers.

The idea for Meet germinated through initial discussions between Vish, who aimed to work in the education space in India for his secondyear project as a part of Harvard’s Design Engineering program, and Medha’s co-

Vish Srivastava discusses the employment app Meet during the Seed for Change competition.

2018-19 Seed for Change Report

11

GREEN SCREEN

Turning Down the Heat in Delhi

Priced at 1% the cost of a conventional air conditioner, Green Screen is an affordable product that not only cools people, but helps solve the problem of why it’s so hot in the first place.

Green Screen is made entirely from agricultural waste found in farms outside of Delhi. Usually, this waste is burned off by farmers to quickly clear fields. But burning this waste significantly contributes to pollution levels in New Delhi, where over 22 million people are exposed to the worst air quality in the world.

We spoke with Gina Ciancone to learn more about Green Screen and its next steps.

Green Screen is a zero-electricity, modular ventilation panel made from agricultural waste to be used in slums of New Delhi, India.

2018 WINNER INDIA

How did this project start?

I led the design of Green Screen throughout a semester-long course taught by Professor Tarun Khanna at Harvard College. The course, “Contemporary Developing Countries,” focused on analyzing the impacts of entrepreneurial solutions to intractable problems in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Our team focused on problems facing the world’s fastest growing megacity — New Delhi, India.

Alongside global health practitioners from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a designer from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I developed Green Screen as a solution that could simultaneously address the inter-connected problems of air pollution and extreme heat. Green Screen

12 The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

is a zero-electricity air-cooling panel made entirely of agricultural waste, which would have otherwise been burned by farmers and further contributed to air pollution. In fact, over 27 million tons of agricultural waste are burned annually, exposing nearly 22 million people to the worst air quality in the world. Such intense air pollution also traps in heat within the city of New Delhi and leads to deadly heat waves.

Our solution simultaneously incentivizes an alternative use to excess agricultural waste and transforms “waste” into a product used to cool those most at risk from extreme heat.

Green Screen was developed through multiple phases of design-thinking: a data analysis of heat and pollution in Delhi, and a needsassessment of slum communities. This led to a fast design charrette of possible solutions, which were combined and edited to create a breakthrough idea. As a designer trained in both architecture and urban planning, I am accustomed to working at different scales, which is reflected in the product’s design and projected scalability from a passive cooling screen to a passively cooled building.

My interdisciplinary background and the diversity of the current team, which is composed of a materials scientist, an atmospheric chemist, and a physician, allowed for the development of an entirely new, unprecedented product. Ultimately, Green Screen is the result of creative problem solving — it utilizes elements from a designer’s toolkit to integrate experimentation, technological possibility, and business success to arrive at an innovative solution.

Green Screen represents the intersection of my own training in product design and urbanism. This product will prove that designthinking is a necessary component to impact intractable problems.

What are you most looking forward to in the next steps of your project?

As with any collaborative project, the most rewarding part is learning from those with whom you work. Green Screen’s diverse team of scientists, designers, and global health specialists built a culture of creativity that resulted in a breakthrough solution to two of the world’s biggest problems: extreme heat and air pollution. I am thrilled to be working alongside energetic, intelligent, and optimistic professionals whose training is vastly different

from my own. The professional diversity allowed us to challenge each other to design stronger, more refined solutions during the development process.

While we have already iterated several prototypes of Green Screen, testing to learn (rather than testing to validate) will be a revealing and exciting moment of the project. Next, we will test the screen’s cooling effectiveness at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and receive feedback from engineers and sustainability specialists. We will be working closely with our sponsors in India, Chintan, and WIEGO to survey housing conditions of target communities, purchase wheat stubble from farmers outside of New Delhi, and implement a pilot product. To really understand the community, we need to be out

in the field with people, working with them in their own spaces. I am greatly looking forward to seeing how our passionate team will attract and mobilize more people to achieve lasting change.

Team Gina Ciancone, MUP '19, Project Lead David Costanza, Rice University School of Architecture Dan Cusworth, PhD '18 (Atmospheric Chemistry) Ramya Pinnamaneni, MPH '18

Green Screen co-founder Gina Ciancone with the latest prototype, at the UN in New York.

2018-19 Seed for Change Report

13

UMBULIZER

Using Tech and Social Media to Protect Human Rights

2018 WINNER

PAKISTAN

Umbulizer is a reliable, low-cost, portable device that provides continuous ventilation to patients in resource-limited healthcare settings of Pakistan. According to the team, the device can help 90% of patients who are struggling to breathe, at a fraction of the cost of traditional ventilators, in a nation that has fewer than 2,000 machine ventilators across its hospitals. The device runs on batteries, uses proprietary illumination and imaging software, and will cost around $2,000 — about

$13,000 cheaper than a typical ventilator.

Additionally, the team manages medical records and prescriptions, and can schedule lab tests and follow-up visits for patients.

Team Shaheer Ahmed Piracha, Project Lead and Engineer Hamza Ali Khan, MBA '19 Sanchay Gupta, MD '21

PRE-TEXTS

Using Tech and Social Media to Protect Human Rights

2018 RUNNER–UP INDIA

Pre-Texts is an effective and efficient pedagogy that acknowledges local strengths that can help promote development in literacy, innovation, and citizenship. The Pre-Texts protocol can raise literacy in lowresource communities thanks to local arts and languages that serve to interpret English language curricular material.

The Pre-Texts team traveled to Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in South India to begin a yearlong project at a local secondary school.

They worked with teachers to bring creativity

14 The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

and local traditions into classrooms, building student-centric environments. They worked with 17 teachers to design lesson plans to introduce the Pre-Texts program to their students, providing a literacy tool for students at all levels.

Team Anshul Kumar, PhD '18 (Sociology) Jahnvi Singh, Cultural Agents Polly Lauer, Cultural Agents

PARIVARTAN

Fighting Disease in Water-Scarce Areas with Hand Sanitizer In September 2018, Sujata Saunik — 2018 Takemi Fellow and Mittal Institute Research Affiliate — and her team traveled to Palghar, a tribal district near Mumbai in Maharashtra.

There, they performed field visits in partnership with the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Department of UNICEF Mumbai to learn about the incidence of fatality and disease in India due to illnesses that could be prevented by hand-washing.

The team’s overall vision is to bring the practice of hand-washing from schools to homes by introducing hand sanitizer to schoolchildren, an ideal alternative for areas that suffer from chronic water shortage. The field visits in September culminated in the official launch of Project Parivartan in January 2019.

2018 RUNNER–UP INDIA

When Saunik’s team arrived in Palghar, they discovered that school staff and students were generally unaware of hand sanitizer and the health benefits it provides. While schools teach students the merits of hand-washing through activities and songs, the action is not always easily enforced or practiced when students go home at the end of the day. The team has big ambitions and aims to introduce

hand sanitizer as part of a package of wallmounted dispensers that contain locally made hand sanitizer at the entrance of each classroom. To introduce a micro-finance opportunity to the community and provide even greater benefit, the team will recruit the students’ mothers to produce and sell their own hand sanitizer. To support this endeavor, Project Parivartan will apply for Prime Minister Modi’s Mudra Funding under the “Make in India Initiative.” Once the funding is secured, they will access the National Rural Livelihood Mission to procure raw materials for the hand sanitizer.

The Parivartan team will continue to monitor the incidence of disease, hoping that their efforts inspire common practice in Palghar and will have a significant, positive impact on health and hygiene in the area.

Team Alastair Fung, MPH ‘18 Nithin Kondapuram, MPH ‘18 Sujata Saunik, Takemi Fellow, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Vivian Zhang, MPH ‘19

2018-19 Seed for Change Report

15

SAKHI

Creating Safe and Sustainable Menstrual Management Products Sakhi is a social enterprise that provides an innovative, high-quality, low-cost, reusable, and environmentally-safe menstrual cup for women and girls in India, along with a gender and culture-sensitive menstrual health education and training program.

2017 WINNER INDIA

Sakhi’s 360-degree approach addresses the significant challenges and taboos faced by the world’s largest menstruating youth population — 116 million girls between ages 15-24 — and the world’s second largest menstruating female population — 358 million women between ages 15-54. Sakhi’s team and strategy prioritizes local entrepreneurship and self-sustainability; culture, religion, and gender sensitivity to create positive social norms; and attention to health safety, sanitary practices, infrastructure challenges, and environmental sustainability. Sakhi’s unique medical-

silicone sterilizer case with menstrual cup is a one-of-a-kind solution, custom-designed for Sakhi’s demographic that includes married millennials, young mothers, working women, and athletes. The Mittal Institute grant and Sakhi’s community reinvestment strategy will yield project sustainability over the first three years and profitability in subsequent years.

Sakhi will continue to incubate the social enterprise to help Indian girls and women eager for an affordable, portable, safe, and hygienic market-based solution.

Team Sutopa Dasgupta, PhD Candidate (South Asian Studies), Harvard University Andrew Powell, Casco Bay Manufacturer Rakhee Goyal, Independent Consultant Usha Venkatachallam, Appropriate IT

BARAKAT BUNDLE

Lifesaving, Low-Cost Kits for Mothers and Newborns 2017 RUNNER–UP INDIA

Barakat Bundle is a nonprofit providing lifesaving bundles to mothers and newborns in South Asia. They package together demandinducing newborn essentials — such as baby clothes — as well as low-cost, evidence-based

16 The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

public health items — such as clean delivery kits for safe births. They provide them to lowincome mothers for the birth of their first child.

The medical items in the bundle specifically target causes of maternal and infant mortality

and morbidities in targeted regions. The desirable goods incentivize demand for the bundle, encouraging utilization. Barakat Bundle integrates seamlessly into the existing community health worker and health system infrastructure, creating a framework for sustainable delivery.

Team Karima Ladhani, ScD ‘17 (Global Health and Population) Nayab Ahmad, Harvard College Jyoti Ramakrishna, MPH ‘15 Amanda Hahnel

ANANTARA

Battling Forest Degradation with Sustainable Harvesting

2017 RUNNER–UP INDIA

Anantara is a not-for-profit design collective working at the intersection of forest conservation through livelihood creation.

By working with forest communities and their emerging small forest enterprises, they seek to convert collector economies into craftsmen communities through design.

The focus is on sustainable harvesting and the creation of new value chains and valueadded facilities within forest communities, to provide year-round employment opportunity through environmentally reinforcing activities.

Forest degradation is linked to unsustainable harvesting, which is a result of acute poverty.

Such practices threaten to erode indigenous cultural knowledge that has accrued over centuries as the forest communities stewarded their ecosystems. There are several NGOs and support institutions actively working to address the issues of forest

conservation through sustainable harvesting and livelihood creation, but they have been largely unsuccessful across two major verticals: design development and market linkages. Anantara seeks to bridge this gap by providing branding, product design services, and a marketing platform. They will create value for the support institutions by increasing efficacy of their livelihoods program, and will create value for the small forest enterprise by improving their products and building a market, empowering forest communities to better steward their ecosystems.

Team Aaron Mendonca, MDes ‘17 Prathima Muniyappa, MDes ‘18 Prabhat Kumar Elena Mechik

2018-19 Seed for Change Report

17

GOMANGO

Tackling the Problem of Food Waste in India

2016 WINNER INDIA

In India, 40% of fruits and vegetables go bad before they ever reach the market. The waste is caused by the lack of a “cold chain” infrastructure — cold storage and refrigerated trucks — to protect perishable food from heat as it makes its way from the farm to the market. The GoMango team is developing a low-cost rental network of refrigerated boxes that will keep perishable food cold on its way

to the market and while waiting to be sold at the market.

Team Naren Tallapragada, PhD ’18 (Systems Biology) Francesco Wiedemann, Harvard i-Lab Venture Incubation Program

TORR ENERGY

Harnessing Renewable Energy from Agricultural Waste

2016 RUNNER–UP INDIA

Torr Energy aims to harness renewable energy from agricultural waste in India to improve the lives of those who need it the most. Using first-generation torrefaction technology, the team has built a small-scale pilot on the ground to provide energy, income, and support to the local communities. Next, the members of Torr Energy would like to set up a scalable pilot using a communitybased model in India, which will purchase

18 The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University

agricultural residue from farmers and partner with local community organizations to produce solid fuel.

Team Kasey Wang, JD ‘17 Kevin Kung, MIT Swati Rao, MIT Zach Cohen, MIT

THE CRAFTSMEN

Sustainable Forest Management Strategies

2016 RUNNER–UP INDIA

According to The Craftsmen team, sustainable forest management strategies are needed to convert collector economies into craftsmen economies that support year-round economic activity. The Craftsmen is a small forest enterprise facilitator that creates new value chains and sets up value-added facilities

for forest products, training communities in sustainable harvesting practices.

Team Aaron Mendonca, MDes ‘17 Elena Mechik

Finalists field questions from the judges and audience at the 2016 Seed for Change competition.

2018-19 Seed for Change Report

19

CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA 02138 https://mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu/