Speaker: Ashifi Gogo, CEO, Sproxil. Ashifi is CEO and Founder of Sproxil, a venture-backed for-profit enterprise that delivers product authentication and supply chain consulting services to pharmaceutical companies.
Sproxil’s services allow end-consumers to verify with a simple free text message that they are not purchasing counterfeit medication. Pharmaceutical companies pay service fees to Sproxil for the increase in sales of genuine pharmaceutical products. It enables consumers to participate in bringing an end to the $75 billion trade in counterfeit medication, while putting manufacturers directly in touch with consumers to close the feedback gap in a cost-efficient scalable electronic way.
Speaker: Nigel Waller, Founder & CEO, Movirtu.
Movirtu provides innovative mobile technology and business models to wireless telecommunication service providers servicing rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia to help them realize shared access to basic mobile phone services at a much lower cost than has been achieved before. Although Movirtu is a for-profit enterprise, the company has an underlying social mission: To expand the use of mobile communication by the rural poor communities in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Asia living on less than $2 a day to improve their sustainable livelihoods and help alleviate poverty.
Grameen Foundation helps the world’s poor, especially women, improve their lives and escape poverty by helping to provide access to appropriate financial services (i.e., small loans and savings accounts), new ways to generate income, and important information about their health, crops, and finances. Student intern Takuhiro Nakamura worked with TaroWorks, Grameen Foundations’ mobile application service for poverty-focused organizations. TaroWorks is a flexible mobile platform, developed by Grameen by extracting essential functions from their different mobile projects. The application provides real-time visibility of data regarding customers, inventories, field agents, and social impact. Nakamura’s role was to help TaroWorks refine its global marketing strategy and develop a go-to-market strategy in India.
PharmaSecure is a social enterprise founded in 2007 to address the problem of global drug counterfeiting. The enterprise features unique identification codes that can be printed or affixed onto every single unit of a medicine and verified by a consumer at the point of purchase via a text message or website confirmation. PharmaSecure also has communication modules that can be used by manufacturers to reach out to consumers who have purchased their medicines for the purpose of prescription refill notifications, information about new products, and reminders to take their medicines. Student intern Andrew Murphy conducted market research in India for a possible expansion of PharmaSecure mobile health services. He also worked on their online platform, psConnect, that will serve as an online space where product users, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and mHealth service providers come to exchange information and where users come to find mHealth services.
Concordia Welfare and Education Foundation (CWEF) is a Hong Kong-based, nonprofit organization dedicated to poverty alleviation through education and service. CWEF coordinates and directs projects in three main areas: Traditional education, public health and sanitation, and rural development. Student intern Claire Barco refined the foundation’s content management system (CMS) and also created training materials for the new system. Additionally, Barco helped develop a fundraising strategy using the new CMS.
The Quito Project’s mission is to collaborate with local partners in developing evidence-based solutions that support and build capacity in the health, education, and social sectors. The Quito Project’s staff work alongside public health and clinical professionals in Quito, drawing on existing evidence to develop public health interventions targeted to specific problems. Student intern Brett Trzcinski worked on Proyecto Telesalud, a mobile device intervention that seeks to improve followup care for new mothers and their babies. His role was to conduct randomized control trials, help enroll patients in the study, and develop a cost/benefit analysis for the intervention.
PharmaSecure is a social enterprise founded in 2007 to address the problem of global drug counterfeiting. The enterprise features unique identification codes that can be printed or affixed onto every single unit of a medicine and verified by a consumer at the point of purchase via a text message or website confirmation. PharmaSecure also has communication modules that can be used by manufacturers to reach out to consumers who have purchased their medicines for the purpose of prescription refill notifications, information about new products, and reminders to take their medicines. Student intern Javier Rivera developed a study to gain insight into the rural market for PharmaSecure. The study focused on consumer behavior, pharmacist response to PharmaSecure solutions, and strategies to raise authentication rates.
Grameen Foundation helps the world’s poor, especially women, improve their lives and escape poverty by helping to provide access to appropriate financial services (i.e., small loans and savings accounts), new ways to generate income, and important information about their health, crops, and finances. Student intern Maharshi Vaishnav devised a go-to-market strategy for the Indonesian market so Grameen’s AppLab could deploy its mobile solutions more broadly in the country. In addition, he worked with a set of Grameen Foundation’s partner companies focused on agricultural value chains.
MHealth Ventures India (MVI) was formed in late 2010 to bring reliable healthcare advice to communities in India at an affordable cost. Its first product was a “call-a-doctor” service that allowed anyone speak to a doctor 24/7 in Hindi, Marathi, and English for as little as 75 cents USD per consultation. The service targets 40 million Hindi- and Marathi-speaking households who lack medical care, but have access to mobile phones. Ross student intern Neelay Choudhury worked with MVI to develop a distribution strategy, including how MVI should grow geographically; financial projections; staffing/resourcing; and investment requirements. Choudhury also developed a set of bundled product concepts that MVI could use to approach prospective partners, as well as a method to assess the attractiveness of bundled product and distribution options.
Twaweza, which means “we can make it happen” in Swahili, is a 10-year, citizen-centered initiative that focuses on large-scale change in East Africa. The initiatiave believes that lasting change requires bottom-up action and seeks to foster conditions and expand opportunities through which millions of people can get information and make change happen in their own communities. Twaweza’s Uwezo initiative is a “citizen movement-based” approach to assessing literacy and numeracy levels in East Africa. Uwezo is engaged in monitoring basic literacy and numeracy levels of children age 5-16 years across at least 50 percent of the districts in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda through a household-based survey. The student team identified a business and technology solution that made Twaweza’s Uwezo work seamlessly in terms of hiring, due diligence, financial flow management, and physical logistics.