Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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Africa: New Push On Malaria
Malaria researchers believe that better coordination and new technologies, such as the use of vaccines and sophisticated disease mapping, can inject new life into the ambitious goal of eradicating the deadly illness. Read More »
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Agricultural Policies in Africa Could Be Harming the Poorest
Published this month in the journal World Development, the study finds that so-called ‘green revolution’ policies in Rwanda - claimed by the government, international donors and organisations such as the International Monetary Fund to be successful for the economy and in alleviating poverty - may be having very negative impacts on the poorest. One of the major strategies to reduce poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is through policies to increase and modernise agricultural production...
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Beyond MOOC Hype
As scores of colleges rush to offer free online classes, the mania over massive open online courses may be slowing down. Even top proponents of MOOCs are acknowledging critical questions remain unanswered, and are urging further study. Read More »
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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Releases Open-Source Software to Support Efforts that Expand Access to Financial Services in Developing Countries
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today released a new open-source software for creating payment platforms that will help unbanked people around the world access digital financial services. The software is designed to provide a reference model for payment interoperability between banks and other providers across a country’s economy. It is available now, free-of-cost, for software developers to adapt and banks, financial service providers and companies to implement. Information on the code can be found at mojaloop.io...
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Digitizing Maps Of Malaria Hotspots To Save Lives
Mapping collaboration between Europe and Africa has led to the creation of a digitized malaria mapping database that for the first time brings together all available malaria data, helping tackle a disease that kills more than 660,000 people every year.
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European Commission Considering Leap into Open-Access Publishing
One of Europe’s biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a “publishing platform” for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe...
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Grameen Foundation and Innovations for Poverty Action Broker New Industry Alliance to Advance Poverty Measurement
Grameen Foundation and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) are pleased to announce a new model for managing the Progress out of Poverty Index® (PPI®), a poverty measurement tool used by nearly 500 organizations around the world. The new model creates the PPI Alliance, a collective governance and funding structure, and designates IPA as the new organizational home for PPI...
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How A Small Group of Entrepreneurs Transformed Government Services
President Obama started with his own White House, recruiting Internet-savvy entrepreneurs to serve as chief technology officer (me), chief performance officer (Jeff Zients), chief information officer (Vivek Kundra) and director for social innovation (Sonal Shah), among other senior positions...
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Initiative for Open Citations Making Great Progress
It is enormously satisfying when a good idea captures the imagination and takes off and that’s precisely what happened with the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) over the past 6 months. Citations are the way that researchers communicate how their work builds on and relates to the work of others and they can be used to trace how a discovery spreads and is used by researchers in different disciplines and countries. Creating a truly comprehensive map of scholarship, however, relies on having a curated machine-readable database of citation information, where the provenance of every citation is clear and reusable. With the launch of I4OC that map, and the potential for anyone to use it to explore the scholarly landscape, comes much closer...
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Nationwide Launch of Mobile Health Program in Rural India Signals New Era of mHealth for Emerging Economies
Today, the Government of India launched a nationwide mobile health program designed to train community health workers and to directly reach millions of women within three years. The program is powered by MOTECH, a robust yet simple-to-use mobile health (mHealth) technology developed by Grameen Foundation, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "Until now, mHealth applications have been relatively small and siloed," said John Tippett, Global Director of Mobile Health at Grameen Foundation. "By allowing systems to work together and serve huge numbers of people, MOTECH opens a new era for tackling global health problems at scale through mobile technology."
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School Systems Desperate for Standards-Aligned Curricula Find Hope
Open Up Resources is a nonprofit collaborative formed by 13 U.S. states that creates high-quality, standards-aligned open educational resources (OERs) that are openly licensed under CC BY 4.0. Unlike other providers, Open Up Resources provides curriculum-scale OER options; they believe that while many people seem to know where to find supplemental materials, most curriculum directors would not know where to look if they were planning a textbook adoption next year. After an article I wrote about OERs last year, I had the opportunity to interview their community evangelist and Chief Marketing Officer, Karen Vaites. In this interview, Karen elaborates on this...
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Special Report - The World Health Organization's Critical Challenge: Healing Itself
For years the WHO has talked about streamlining its complex structure, governance and financing to make it more efficient. Critics say the organisation needs deep reforms to allow it to show clear leadership in promoting health and to respond decisively to disease emergencies that may span many countries. But progress has been painfully slow...
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UK Doubles Support for Neglected Tropical Diseases - To Protect 200 Million People
The UK will protect over 200 million people from the pain and disfigurement caused by treatable tropical diseases, International Development Secretary Priti Patel announced today. Neglected Tropical Diseases, such as trachoma, Guinea worm and river blindness, are avoidable infections but can deform, disable, blind and even kill if left untreated. They affect over a billion people in the poorest and most marginalised communities in the world, stopping children going to school and parents going to work - costing developing economies billions of dollars every year in lost productivity and reducing overall global prosperity...
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