Machine learning, the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) focused on giving computers the ability to learn from data without explicit programming, is providing millions of customers recommendations on Amazon and automating cars. But how can it be applied to drive better global development outcomes? Can machine learning innovations tackle the world’s toughest development challenges? This panel will feature experts in machine learning, innovators using machine learning in their work, and organizations dedicated to the expansion of digital technology for development. Panelists will discuss the following topics:
why machine learning is a relatively nascent innovative tool for development,
how machine learning is being used in the field to drive development impact in a variety of sectors,
how different organizations are catalyzing innovation in machine learning (and how they can be doing it better),
and what challenges still need to be overcome for machine learning to reach its full potential in global development.
In an environment where funders and governments are concerned with achieving more with less, where it's becoming ever more urgent to effectively address the needs of vulnerable communities, Results-Based Financing (RBF) has rapidly emerged as an essential tool to maximize the effectiveness of public funding in international development. In the last decade, we have witnessed RBF gain momentum in a range of sectors (such as health, education, workforce development, or institutional strengthening), with more than $26.9 billion USD disbursed in over 78 low and middle-income countries. We have also witnessed a corresponding recognition of the challenges involved in designing and implementing RBF in a thoughtful manner, that actually unlocks its potential and leads to improved social outcomes. As Owen Barder, from the Center for Global Development, simply put, “for payment by results to work, you have to get a lot of things right.”
In light of the evident transition towards a focus on outcomes in today’s field of international development, it is crucial to ensure that policy-makers, funders, investors, and service providers alike understand how to best apply this cutting-edge mechanism to their specific context and how to adapt and equip themselves with the necessary technical know-how to succeed.
This panel will build on the experience of various stakeholders undertaking different roles across the landscape of RBF, including leading service providers, donors, and intermediaries. The panel will offer a deeper look into the practice of RBF, following the journey that these actors took in their transition to a focus on outcomes; from the motivation behind their strategic move, to the challenges encountered and the actions taken to successfully address these.
Watch the video here.
The following innovators have been selected to participate in the Demonstration Stage program at Global Innovation Week's Innovation Marketplace.
Stability and Security innovators present:
RIWI Corp
MOPA: UX – Information Technologies
University of Washington & Emory University
LayerTech Labs
Global Communities
Ushahidi
An entrepreneur develops a social enterprise that profitably delivers high-quality, low-cost pre-Kindergarten to rural households in India. A technology company develops a monetizable mobile communications platform that delivers high-quality, localized agronomic advice and price information to small holder farmers in Ghana. These businesses might deliver meaningful impacts to their customers in India and Ghana, but why should they be limited to just those countries?
While the private sector cannot solve all problems, we often think of the solution to many social challenges is the development of a new technology or business model. Connovo believes that there plenty of good business ideas out there already and the real challenge is how to replicate and adapt the market-validated ideas to the Mexican context. Connovo is the first "impact venture-builder" based in Mexico that “scales what works.” Join Connovo’s co-founder to learn more about its unique replication methodology that finds successful innovations backed by evidence and assesses, packages, and transforms them into a highly impactful, scalable and profitable ventures specifically designed for the Mexican.
The following innovators have been selected to participate in the Demonstration Stage program at Global Innovation Week's Innovation Marketplace.
Prosperity innovators present:
Bandhan Konnagar
Ideas42
YouthMappers
Field Ready
Fundación Capital
BRAC
When many people think about how to improve health outcomes in the developing world, many focus on obviously health interventions and/or health systems - immunizations, health workforce capacity, and so. But what about housing improvements, like improved flooring? As highlighted in the Center for Global Development's Millions Saved case studies on cost-effective health interventions, rigorous evidence from Mexico about concrete flooring suggests that such improvements can dramatically improve child health and even make mothers happier. Inspired by this evidence, American social entrepreneur, Gayatri Datar, launched EarthEnable to produce and sell custom-developed earthen floors to the 80% of Rwandans living with dirt floors. The floors - a cheaper alternative to concrete - eliminate unsanitary dirt floors and provide affordable, sanitary flooring that can be washed, cleaned, and used to create a healthy home environment for millions of people. Join Gaya to hear about EarthEnable's business model, how she looked to evidence to inform the venture, and how she is collaborating with Paul Gertler (Berkeley) and other leading researchers to deepen the evidence base on the improved flooring and test different approaches to the business model.
For more information on EarthEnable, visit: www.earthenable.org
For more information on the Center for Global Development's Millions Lived case study on the Mexico program (Piso Firme), visit: http://millionssaved.cgdev.org/case-studies/mexicos-piso-firme-program. You can also attend the talk by Amanda Glassman, COO & Senior Fellow at CGD and co-author of Millions Saved, later today to hear more about cost-effective interventions in global health.
Is citizen advocacy or central government oversight more effective at reducing corruption in delivery of public services? Is there an economic argument for providing free legal assistance to the poor? Can elections be leveraged to incentive better public service delivery at the local level? These are just a few of the questions with which many donors and practitioners grapple. Grounded in its Learning Agenda, USAID’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) Center of Excellence has pioneered partnerships between USAID practitioners and leading academics to inform USAID strategic planning and programming in this critical sector as well as to address gaps in the global evidence base on what works in democracy, rights, and governance. Join this panel to hear from USAID practitioners and leading political scientists from top universities about the latest in democracy, rights, and governance research and why such academia-donor relationships are win-win for both.
Watch the video here.
In 2012, USAID had begun to see successes from and generate excitement around its Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) program - the Agency’s tiered, evidence-based, open innovation fund. USAID and DFID began discussing ways to enable other donors, like DFID, to take part in this type of model. Two years later, USAID announced the launch of the Global Innovation Fund (GIF), a non-profit innovation fund supported by USAID, DFID, Swedish SIDA, Omidyar Network, and Australian DFAT. GIF’s design was originally inspired by the programmatic approach and experience of DIV at USAID, and USAID served as one of GIF’s founding funders, helping to crowd in other bilateral funders. Nearly three years into the launch of the fund, this panel will feature GIF leadership and supporters reflecting on lessons learned from this partnership model for supporting evidence-based innovation.
Watch the video here.
Though enrollment in primary education has seen unprecedented gains over the last decade, learning levels remain low across many developing countries, with many enrolled students lacking basic reading and mathematics skills. The progress made in school enrollment has been countered by new bottlenecks: schools are flooded with first-generation learners, resulting in classrooms with heterogeneous learning levels; teachers are pressured to complete dense curricula and prepare students for high-stake exams, leading them to teach to the top of the class; poorly resourced schools have neither the human nor material resources to support adaptive, student-centered learning. Though in school, large numbers of children are failing to acquire basic skills and falling further and further behind as they are pushed through the education system.
As resource-constrained governments seek scalable solutions to improve the quality of primary education programs, recent research has provided encouraging evidence that relatively low-cost interventions can make substantial impacts on learning outcomes. This panel will feature researchers and innovators, including several that are USAID partners, who are working with governments to understand and incorporate innovative models to improve educational quality and learning outcomes, including regrouping and teaching students by ability, introducing adaptive learning technologies, improving access to information about the value of education, and innovating in service delivery through public-private partnerships.
Watch the video here.
The following innovators have been selected to participate in the Demonstration Stage program at Global Innovation Week's Innovation Marketplace.
Health and WASH innovators present:
Living Goods
VisionSpring
Evidence Action
EarthEnable
Massachusetts General Hospital
Johns Hopkins University
Institute for Global Environmental Studies (IGES)
Premise Data
Koe Koe Tech
The following innovators have been selected to participate in the Demonstration Stage program at Global Innovation Week's Innovation Marketplace.
Humanitarian Assistance innovators present:
3D-PAWS
HDX/UNOCHA
Grillo
MANA Nutrition
World Bank's Insurance Program (KLIP)
LMMS
Good Works Studio: Emergency Floor
CITE
HUMANIT-3D
How should policymakers and social enterprises in developing countries account for the fact that people are not hyper-rational, utility-maximizing machines? At the intersection of psychology and economics, behavioral economics studies how individuals actually think and behave, as opposed to how they’re expected to behave in abstract models. The word “innovation” often connotes words like “disruptive” and “game-changing,” which imply that only those ideas that produce highly visible, step-change improvements in outcomes are innovative; yet, the growing field of behavioral economics in development shows that marginal, sometimes even no-cost, changes to policy and program design can significantly influence the behavior and decision-making of the poor and public service providers alike, yielding better outcomes.
This panel will feature thought leaders, practitioners, and researchers who are leveraging support and partnership with the U.S. government to test and scale innovations that rely on more realistic models of human behavior, centered on making public services more cost-effective and user-friendly. Panelists will discuss a range of topics from how to effectively recruit more intrinsically-motivated, higher-performing community health workers in Zambia; how to induce behavior change related to contraceptive use in Burkina Faso; providing incentives to households to boost child vaccination rates in India; the importance of human-centered design in refining products and services; and how “less is more” when training microentrepreneurs in finance and accounting.
Watch the video here.
Many health programs are judged on their intermediate outputs—the number of prenatal care visits or the number of vaccine doses purchased—without a direct assessment of health impact. At the same time, many low- and middle-income countries are seeing rapid improvement in other drivers of health, such as girls’ education, urbanization, and economic growth. To make sure that our investments are making a difference for health, rigorous impact evaluation is key. Why so important? Because if we knew that health would have improved even without a health intervention, the money could have been better spent elsewhere. Join Amanda Glassman, a leading expert on evidence in the health sector, who will discuss her work on Millions Saved -- gathering and analyzing 22 large-scale programs with rigorous evaluations to learn more about what works, and how evaluations have helped to grow the scale of programs and their impact.
Despite the real progress that has been made in the world of impact evaluation, many needed types of data are unavailable. For instance, cost-effectiveness is important to many donors and policymakers who want to know if the health gained is worth the cost of the program—and scarce health dollars. Yet few studies reported empirical estimates of cost-effectiveness; the Millions Saved team had to derive the other estimates from modelling and secondary sources. And some categories of intervention—for example, those against non-communicable diseases—remain woefully under-evaluated.
Watch the video here.
The following innovators have been selected to participate in the Demonstration Stage program at Global Innovation Week's Innovation Marketplace.
Cutting Edge innovators present:
FarmDrive
APOPO
PeaceTech Labs
Rana Labs
Wings for Aid Foundation
GlobalMedic
We Care Solar
From identifying a problem to be solved, sourcing the innovation globally and locally, and providing the seed funding to the actual application of the innovation in a real-world context to the thing we care about most—RESULTS—this special session is intended to recognize excellence at each point in the innovation continuum. Innovation is “a voracious appetite for excellence.” This session celebrates:
Excellence in Vision
Excellence in Partnership
Excellence in Culture/Leadership
Excellence in Execution and Operations
Join us in recognizing the work being done around the world to maximize human potential and ensure that all people around the world are able to capitalize on their own possibilities. Maximized potential ultimately results in the ability to minimize AID.
This session will demonstrate how innovation is a hand-up not a hand out.
Watch the video here.
The following innovators have been selected to participate in the Demonstration Stage program at Global Innovation Week's Innovation Marketplace.
Agriculture innovators present:
One Acre Fund
myAgro
HarvestPlus
aQysta
Green Heat
Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies
Central University of Technology
Evaptainers
The following innovators have been selected to participate in the Demonstration Stage program at Global Innovation Week's Innovation Marketplace.
Education innovators present:
Teaching at the Right Level
Learning Equality
Resources for the Bling
Little Thinking Minds
Pixatel
TredEd
BRCK
Ark EPG
SIL-LEAD: Bloom
The following innovators have been selected to participate in the Demonstration Stage program at Global Innovation Week's Innovation Marketplace.
Energy innovators present:
Burn
Fenix
Vitalite
D.light
Solar Sister
Greenlight Planet
Sparkmeter
UVG
Safe Water Enterprises (SWEs, sometimes known as water kiosks) offer an innovative, decentralized approach to delivering safe, affordable water to the poor in urban, peri-urban and rural settings. Entrepreneurs, impact investors and governments have developed a range of SWE models over the last 15 years to deliver high quality, treated water services in an operationally and financially sustainable way.
This session will draw on the findings from a new, in-depth study of 14 SWEs and the broader SWE sector to demonstrate the critical role they can play in achieving SDG 6. SWEs can provide safe water for at least 1 billion of the estimated 4.4 billion people who do not consume safe water daily because of unimproved sources and/or inadequate treatment. Comprehensive analysis from this study offers insights into what needs to be done to scale up the reach and impact of SWEs in order to realize this potential.
The session will start with a quick overview of the main findings from the study followed by a panel discussion with representatives from three SWEs operating in four different countries (Cambodia, Ghana, Haiti, and India). The panel will share their views on the key challenges facing SWEs to achieve greater scale, efficiency and effectiveness. The audience will be encouraged to participate in this discussion by asking questions and sharing their own experience with SWEs.
