Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

is the new buzzword. Much hope has been placed on technological innovation, social innovation, financial innovation, and organizational innovation; we might even start hearing talk about the need to . However, innovation in itself is not enough. Social impact—meaning positive change for society and, in this case, low-income communities in the Global South—requires successful implementation and use of technologies at a large scale. However, many challenges (ranging from cultural acceptance to economic affordability to environmental and institutional sustainability) remain to be addressed, as there are numerous pitfalls between the initial conception and large-scale adoption of a technology. Innovation must be tailored to the context. Innovation in the Global South must be low-cost, scalable, robust, and socioculturally accepted. Some key leverage factors include conducting a thorough assessment of beneficiaries’ actual needs, their ability to pay, finding an industrial partner to manufacture a technology, an accurate business model that ensures long-term financial sustainability, and the ability to develop a successful supply chain (including quality insurance, training, maintenance, etc.). Furthermore, legal questions regarding patents and national standards must be considered. Technological innovation must also be in line with the objectives of a circular economy and be adequately recyclable. The opportunities to fail are numerous; engineers who engage in technological innovation, especially in low-income countries, must be aware of and able to address them.

In humanitarian emergencies, tools like mobile phones and online platforms can offer great improvements for remote data collection and communication with communities, especially where aid access is limited due to high levels of insecurity. But while new technologies are increasingly receiving attention, discussions of risks often fall too short. Digital tools carry biases can complicate crisis dynamics and make aid actors and recipients susceptible to digital interception and surveillance. This paper discusses two types of known challenges with technology uses in humanitarian purposes: First, rushed or improper implementation can lead to problems or high long-term costs. Second, even seemingly successful innovations that are well received by stakeholders can create ‘digital harm’ that sometimes seems invisible. Technical vulnerabilities and even small mistakes can incur data breaches, interception and manipulation of information and malicious attacks on critical tools. Standards and good practices to prevent potential damage are not keeping up with the rapid speed of technology implementations. To contribute to emerging efforts in responsible data and responsible innovation, this paper develops 10 practice-based principles for humanitarians introducing technology to their work in conflict settings. The work is grounded in findings of a 3-year research project on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of aid in Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan and Syria.

This article presents our work with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) centered on preservation of human lives and the ecosystems that support them. In the Taim Ecological Station located in Southern Brazil, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and other stakeholders have acted collaboratively to assess geographic information to help for the elaboration of an environmental plan to solve specific community demands and also to monitor the impact and dynamic aspects of the ecosystem, such as the occurrence of fire, invasive species, and environmental infractions. Our current work focuses on enhancing the regional models using precision and super high-resolution images taken by UAVs especially for those areas already identified as high risk. Meteorological sensors carried by UAVs can be employed to collect atmospheric information, providing better precision for the meteorological models at a local level. When these data are integrated in hydraulic/hydrological models, scene-generation becomes possible, thus allowing us to predict which regions are vulnerable to floods or landslides depending on different levels of rainfall. To foster the adaptation to global changes with the Porto Alegre Metropolitan region as a pilot area, we recently brought together individuals and volunteers willing to create technical tools and instruments.

The number of refugees and displaced persons around the world has reached historic levels. Education in Emergencies responses have traditionally focused on primary education with higher education opportunities often having been perceived as a luxury. Current statistics on refugee access to education confirms this ongoing trend: 50% of refugee children access primary education, 22% secondary education, and only 1% higher education. Children and youth are particularly vulnerable to losing their right to education, a basic human right that is enshrined in the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 1951 Refugee Convention, and is essential to the exercise of many other human rights. In 2015, the United Nations adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, thereby broadening the education mandate to include lifelong learning. Refugee youth have extremely limited options in conflict and crisis zones. However, rapid advances in technology and online learning have laid the foundations for making higher education opportunities accessible for refugee youth. Education fosters innovation and entrepreneurial skills that are important for employability, economic activity, and job creation—elements that are critical for stability during times of reconstruction and for longer term sustainable development. If refugees and internally displaced persons receive a quality education while in exile, they are more likely to develop the necessary skills to make use of the existing economic, social, and political systems in their host communities as well as upon returning home. This paper analyzes the contribution of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to building twenty-first-century skills and explores the value of tutoring and mentoring models, learner retention, learning technologies, and provision of language and subject matter support that best mediate higher level learning in fragile contexts. Variables such as sustainability, operability, equal access, cultural and linguistic ownership, livelihoods, and context relevance were used to analyze available evidence in an effort to inform optimal design and scalability of such learning spaces, as well as their potential use in migrant refugee contexts. The importance of refugee ownership and empowerment are emphasized as vectors for ensuring the sustainability of HE spaces in fragile contexts and for fostering creativity and innovation, thereby feeding into the larger framework of Education for All and Sustainable Development Goal 4.

Open geographic data and crowdsourcing mapping activities have made geodata more accessible for humanitarian actors and the opportunities of use greater. However, large volumes of data spread over multiple datasets combined with poor information management rules make efficient use by humanitarian actors difficult. Locating health facilities in disaster areas is a good example of this challenge. Many databases on health sites are available. Some, such as Open Street Map (OSM), are easily accessible but still largely incomplete and unreliable, others are much better but are not easily shared outside of the organizations which have gathered them, or are regional in their coverage. All these datasets complement each other in terms of geographical coverage and in terms of the information they contain, however they are almost never readily available in a consolidated, freely accessible way. This can seriously hamper initial relief efforts in emergencies. To address these issues healthsites.io, the International Committee of the Red-Cross (ICRC) and the International Hospital Federation (IHF) have joined their competences and networks in order to create a free, curated, global source of healthcare location data. This open development initiative called aims to create an online map of every health facility in the world and make the details of each location easily accessible. In order to achieve this goal, the project has developed a specific master data management methodology which the healthsites.io team are in the process of implementing. This paper will present in details the technical, but also institutional, challenges that need to be overcome to collect, aggregate, consolidate, quality-assure, and distribute more than 150,000 reliable locations of health sites throughout the world.

Over decades, millions of rands and countless volunteer hours were used to attack the problems facing youth across the nation. Yet, by most standards, problems have worsened. There are no simple answers as the obstacles that today’s youth have to overcome are many and formidable. It is the aim of this project to create a concentrated effort in the Gelvandale area using mobile technology to address a number of the challenges faced by at-risk-youth in this area. The primary aim of the research is to determine and develop best practices and strategies for overcoming challenges and creating successful leadership experience for youth from the Gelvandale area. A secondary objective of the research is to determine how Information Communication Technology and then specifically mobile technologies can be used to achieve the primary aim without excluding human participation. This paper will discuss the approach taken to the exploratory study, outline the objectives and highlight not only the impact achieved to date but also the lessons learnt.

Point of care (POC) testing in communities, home settings, and primary healthcare centers is believed to have tremendous potential in reducing delays in diagnosing and initiating treatment for diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, syphilis, and malaria. Quick diagnosis and further management decisions completed in the same clinical encounter or at least the same day, while the patient waits, promise to overcome delays associated with conventional laboratory-based testing. However, the availability of cheap, simple, and rapid tests that can be conducted outside laboratories does not automatically ensure successful POC testing. In order to understand the new roles and challenges medical devices such as these encounter, we need to study how diagnostics are used at the POC and integrated into workflow and patient pathways. This chapter reviews selected results from a qualitative research project on barriers to POC testing in India and South Africa and discusses them comparatively. The project used semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions to examine diagnostic practices across major diseases and actors in homes, clinics, communities, hospitals, and laboratories in South Africa and India. In comparing selected results, it becomes clear that both countries have very different diagnostic eco-systems that provide very different conditions for POC testing. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how to take such insights into account when designing POC testing programs.

Health hackathons are multidisciplinary events bringing together diverse stakeholders to solve key health challenges through a process of co-creation. Health hackathons have gained significant traction as sources of medical innovation globally. They carry particular significance for addressing health discrepancies in resource-limited settings, where there is dire need for cost-effective medical technologies that can deliver high-quality health in an affordable and sustainable way. This paper discusses the model of MIT Hacking Medicine’s health hackathons, and its application to hackathons in India and Uganda for medical innovation by the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Global Health. Case studies of successful projects coming out of these hackathons are discussed to illustrate the potential of such innovations for real-world impact and sustainable growth in frontier markets. Examples of the tools developed to support further project development after the end of the hackathon and to keep track of project progress and impact are presented. The hacking philosophy pioneered by MIT Hacking Medicine is taken one step further with the establishment of CAMTech Co-creation Labs on the ground in India and Uganda and the CAMTech Innovation Platform. The CAMTech Co-creation Labs and Innovation Platform form long-lasting international partnerships that seek to reinvent healthcare in low- and middle-income countries and offer promise for cost-effective medical solutions in both resource-limited and resource-rich settings.

Surgery saves lives in traumas, obstetric emergencies, infections, oncology, and more. Indeed, 30% of the global disease burden requires surgical therapy, yet in lower middle-income countries, 5 billion people have little or no access to safe surgical care. At the same time, safety of surgical providers is a must, given the heavy burden of infections due to bodily fluid splashes in austere settings. Safe surgery—for both patients and providers—is thus a global health priority. SurgiBox, a joint project of MIT D-Lab, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the program EssentialTech Cooperation & Development Center EPFL, aims to develop, evaluate, and ultimately deploy a new technology to help increase access to safe surgery. SurgiBox shrinks the scope of the sterility challenge from the room to the critical space immediately over the incision. Users seal the modular system of sterile clear containers over the patient and operate via ports. An integrated airflow system controls enclosure conditions. Everything folds for rapid deployment. This project requires close dialogue among stakeholders with iterative, rapid prototyping changes. Benchtop and simulation testing to date demonstrate superior environmental control compared to standard operating rooms, notably including setup time, time to surgical site sterility, resistance to active contamination, and air changes per hour. Ongoing efforts include testing in stress use scenarios to replicate field conditions, field testing, in vivo testing, manufacturing, and mapping out a sustainable deployment and scale-up strategy.

As per 2011 census, nearly 44% of rural households do not have access to electricity in India and those who have access suffer from unreliable electricity supply affecting education, income generation and access to information. For lighting, one-third households rely on kerosene, which provides poor quality light and is damaging to health. Lack of access and reliable supply undermines the ability of the households and micro/small enterprises to move out of the vicious cycle of energy poverty. In rural India, several of these enterprises are owned and managed by women entrepreneurs and self-help groups, which were established for income-generating activities and empowerment of women. In 2005, Government of India initiated a large, national rural electrification programme to provide electricity to all villages and households. It has been recognized that grid supply may not be feasible or cost-effective for every village, and hence, due attention is being given to renewable-based decentralized distributed generation systems, such as biomass gasifiers. This paper provides insights regarding experience of developing two-stage biomass gasifier for Indian conditions through an innovative technology transfer and intellectual property rights sharing agreement and its field implementation through partnerships with the state government and community-based organizations in the state of Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. This technology will provide reliable electricity to women groups owned livelihood activities, increasing the income generated by them, and electrify rural households.