Aid Innovation Challenge

In tough economic times, agencies are increasingly relying on new innovations that will save them time and money to counterbalance their shrinking budgets and resource pools. The Aid Innovation Challenge seeks to find the latest innovation to help improve humanitarian aid delivery.

While conventional atmospheric water generators struggle in arid climates, AquaPoro's groundbreaking ALMA-based (Atmospheric Low-humidity Moisture Adsorption) technology thrives, extracting water from the air even in the world's driest regions. AquaPoro's market-ready Droplet™ harnesses this revolutionary ALMA science today, providing reliable water security at the household level where traditional methods fall short. With Droplet in production and Stream™ on the horizon—capable of producing up to 500 liters of water daily—AquaPoro isn't just envisioning solutions to the global water crisis; they're implementing them, transforming the air around us into a sustainable water supply for households, communities, and nations worldwide.

Hulo is the first humanitarian cooperative. We connect logistics stakeholders to increase the impact of humanitarian aid and reduce environmental impacts by pooling resources, optimizing supply chain management, creating Joint Initiatives, and developing new Digital Solutions for today’s challenging world.

Humanitarian needs are increasing at an alarming rate while funding is failing to keep pace. Climate change is a reality that is here to stay, further complexifying aid operations. As humanitarians, we have a duty to increase aid’s efficiency, reduce its impact on the environment, and avoid the duplication of efforts. We believe that the humanitarian sector is at a turning point: we must change our ways of working to increase solidarity and the pooling of resources. Together, we can innovate and provide better, more efficient aid.

Medical oxygen is often not available in crisis regions. After natural or humanitarian disasters with increased numbers of victims or even just in very rural areas, the medical infrastructure may collapse or be insufficient.

In many cases, the logistical infrastructure is also inadequate, making it difficult to transport liquid oxygen or O2 cylinders. Transporting O2 cylinders is also very costly, time-consuming, dangerous and ties up manpower that could be used for other important tasks. In short, the transport of medical oxygen is inefficient, inflexible and unsustainable.

With German Erecelliance’s Portable Oxygen System GEPOS you avoid all the abovementioned difficulties and achieve an increased level of speed, flexibility, cost savings and sustainability in the supply of medical oxygen.

GrowStream is a subsurface microporous irrigation system that has the highest water efficiency of any current irrigation method. Drip irrigation, which was implemented over 50 years ago has been adopted in many areas for its water conservation, but drip systems have their limitations. Improvements and enhancements to drip irrigation, such as micro-emitters, copper-infused tubing, and smart controllers have been developed over the past decades. However, no major advances in irrigation technology have been released, until Growstream.

Growstream is a “plant-responsive” system, which uses “organic chemistry” to interact directly with plant root signals to regulate the release of water and fertilizers/bio-organics & other amendments from the GS tube, directly into the root zone of plants.

Eyeglasses are a ubiquitous, simple tool we take for granted in the developed world, but the infrastructure to deliver eyeglasses to the 2.5 billion people living without them is essentially absent in developing nations.

They have created a simple, easily scaled solution, which includes the USee, an easy to use “self-refraction” diagnostic tool, and snap together eyeglasses. This system can be used by anyone, anywhere in the world.

The Solar Cow and Power Milk is a social engineering project that provides positive reinforcement to parents in the form of an electrical power source in exchange of sending their children to school.

When children arrive at school in the morning, they just attach their batteries to the Solar Cow’s udders’. At the end of the school day, they can leave with the full supply of valuable electricity.

Families can save 10-20% of the income they used to spend for charging a phone. This means that parents are incentivised to send their children to school to get free electricity where the source is, as opposed to sending them to work.

After a disaster, providing access to electricity brings a tangible solution to powering a makeshift hospital, supplying water-pumps and creating telecommunication networks to synchronise rescue. There must be energy that is quick to install, easy to set up and reliable.

To do this, French start-up Zéphyr Solar developed lightweight solar panels and integrated them on top of solar balloons. They produce enough energy to power ground activities and supply on-board equipment, such as communication antennas or cameras. The electricity is transmitted through a cable to a technical box where it is transformed and stored to further power various equipment at all hours.

These solar balloons help to bring energy and services quickly to isolated sites.

In 2013, judges at AidEx praised winner Hope for the creation of a mobile app which builds a fast and reliable channel between blood donors and those who require blood, a gap that was identified by founder, Amgad Morgan when he was browsing social media one day. ‘I wondered if in addition to people on Facebook and Twitter, there might also be people on the streets who would need a faster and more accurate way to get this information,’ he remarked after winning the title.

The judges commended Morgan for the simple but community driven impetus behind the project, as well as its potential to help a huge number of people. Judge Arne Pauwels, winner of the 2013 Wakati entry explained that the fact that Hope had the ability to influence the lives of thousands of people was one of the standout features of the invention. Michael Pritchard of Lifesaver said, ‘Hope didn’t just have a concept, but delivered something about blood donation, not by trying to create a new platform – which many might have done – but using existing ones, like Twitter and Facebook, and using clever bots and algorithms to search those. This has fantastic applicability to this world.’

The ReciproBoo shelter is an innovation in shelter construction that can assist refugees worldwide. Aid agencies distribute hundreds of thousands of tarpaulins every year to these refugees but do not provide a frame to make a shelter.  People then struggle to build a decent shelter for their families. It is in response to these poorly constructed shelters that the ReciproBoo shelter has been developed.  The shelter is unique in that it is the only shelter to use a reciprocal frame roof. This reciprocal frame is a self- supporting structure that provides the exceptional weight bearing strength of the roof. By using a four pole reciprocal frame it has now been possible to refine and develop this design into a shelter kit; the ReciproBoo Shelter Kit (RSK). The final RSK design, in either bamboo or tubular steel, has been developed with strength and simplicity in mind.

United Nations statistics show that 45% of fruit and vegetables never reach market because they go bad before they get there.

Arne Pauwels, the founder of Wakati, believes it is not always using the newest technology that makes something innovative. Instead, it is a case of understanding how current practices can be modified to cater for the users’ needs and processes with the least amount of interference. And that’s how the Wakati One technology came into being. The small solar-fuelled fan and tent creates a sterilised micro climate meaning smallholder farmers can increase the shelf life of their crops. According to Arne, winning the Aid Innovation Challenge gave him ‘some great contacts and also a strong recommendation which opens doors in a lot of international organisations’ as well as the drive to push forwards.

In order to create a product that would be truly useful for refugees, India Impex founder, Divyesh Thakkar spent time with large aid agencies visiting many of the refugee camps in Africa to better understand what their beneficiaries needed from their solar lamps. And rather than just providing the lamps, India Impex actually trains refugees to use the lanterns. What’s more, the lamps can last up to 3 years without needing to change the batteries.

According to Divyesh, ‘If we technically train women and girls to manage the lamps, it becomes a win-win situation for everyone.’ Following winning the accolade, Divyesh noted that orders streamed in so fast, they could hardly keep pace!

A medical dispenser that emits a reminder alert to HIV sufferers prompting them to take antiretroviral medication. That was the first product to ever win the Aid Innovation Challenge. Over 5 million people receive treatment for HIV but often fail to take their medication either because they forget or illiteracy or innumeracy means they’re not sure when to take the drugs. Cue MedAlert.

Inventor Claire said, ‘I came up with the idea during the final year of my product design degree at university after reading a heartbreaking BBC article on AIDS orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa and the difficulties in ensuring they take their medication on time. It seemed astonishing that despite having the power between life and death, something so seemingly straightforward as time keeping could be a real problem for these people, and I wanted to do something to help.’