The WE CARE Solar project, which includes I School Ph.D. student Melissa Ho, was awarded the Social Impact Assessment prize at the 11th annual Global Social Venture Competition, hosted at UC Berkeley April 22–23.
This year's competition included over 500 entries from 149 business schools around the country. WE CARE Solar beat out four other finalists for the Social Impact Assessment prize, winning $5000. The venture’s “solar suitcase” provides a plug-and-play system to obstetric health facilities in developing regions that powers lighting, mobile communication, and essential medical devices.
Melissa Ho serves as the technical advisor for the team. She is a doctoral student at the I School and a part of the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) program. Her doctoral research focuses on ICT for healthcare in developing countries, and she has recently returned from a year in East Africa, working on the use of mobile devices for information management in the Uganda Output Based Aid health project.
For the finals presentation, the team brought the auditorium into the darkness and asked the audience to imagine what it would be like to be a young mother in labor, trying to get emergency health care in a room lit with a kerosene lamp. After presenting the impact assessment and statistics, they returned the room to darkness with only a photograph of a kerosene lamp–lit maternity ward, reminded the audience that the product could provide light for childbearing women for pennies a day, and then turned on the solar suitcase.
“It apparently worked, and the audience was moved,” according to co-founder Dr. Laura Stachel. “One Kenyan man jumped up and down begging us to bring the technology to Kenya. Another man, from Uganda, urged us to do the same. And a wonderful group from Senegal who will be founding maternity clinics asked to partner with us.”
In addition to Melissa Ho, the team includes co-founder Laura Stachel, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Public Health (who also has an MD from UCSF and MPH from Berkeley); Abhay Nihalani, an MBA/MPH candidate at the School of Public Health and the Haas School of Business; co-founder Hal Aronson, a principal of Solar Way Forward, a solar design, education, and consultation firm; Almaz Negash, founder of Entwine Global; and Michael MacHarg, a consultant with Arc Finance.
