The DIV Portfolio of Grantees
ANNOUNCING THE LATEST DIV GRANTS
The personality test: Unlocking credit to entrepreneurs in the Muslim world
$438,000 | Egypt | Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are a significant engine to growth. Yet in developing countries, there is a “missing middle” phenomenon: there are many informal microenterprises and large corporations, but few SMEs. Underlying this problem, although there is a rapidly expanding microcredit sector and sophisticated corporate banking, there is relatively little financing for SMEs. In part, bank lending is stymied by a lack of appropriate, low-cost screening tools to identify high potential entrepreneurs, since SMEs often lack extensive business plans, collateral or borrowing history.
THE PROJECT: The Entrepreneurial Finance Lab Research Initiative has pioneered an automated, low-cost tool that seeks to solve this screening problem. The tool applies psychometric principles to credit scoring, examining such dimensions as intelligence, business acumen, honesty and psychological profile to predict risk and future earnings potential. In tests over the last four years in 7 countries across Latin America and Africa, the tool was able to predict default as well as or better than credit scoring models used in developed countries with corporate clients. The tool is already unlocking millions of profitable private sector lending to SMEs in Africa. With Stage 2 support from DIV, EFL-RI is seeking to have a similar catalytic effect in the Muslim world, starting in Egypt.
PROJECTED COST-EFFECTIVENESS: The low-cost psychometric tools could provide a viable alternative to the traditional screening methods whose requirements are prohibitively difficult for typical SME business owners to meet.
Click HERE to read the full project description
The “Netflix” electricity model: EGG-energy
$100,000 | Tanzania | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Three out of four people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity. The problem is especially acute in rural areas, where electrification rates are often lower than 5%. In Tanzania, more than 80% of the country’s 43 million people are off the power grid, and instead spend an annual $790 million on lighting and basic electricity needs. Those without grid access depend primarily on imported kerosene for lighting, and expensive, often distant, charging businesses to power their cell-phones.
THE PROJECT: EGG-energy is an innovative private venture that bridges the “last mile” power distribution gap to bring affordable, reliable and clean energy with a business model that has won numerous awards and fellowships. In rural and peri-urban areas, EGG-energy charges small, lead-acid batteries from the national power grid or its own solar charging stations, and rents them out to individual and institutional customers. Each battery provides power for 3-5 nights.
PROJECTED COST-EFFECTIVENESS: At a price of $5 per month for their subscription after the installation of electrical wiring, EGG-energy customers power a package of 3 lamps, one cell phone charger, and 1 radio, and pay 35% less than the average cost of kerosene and public cell phone charging.
Click HERE to read the full project description
Maximizing the development impact of migrant remittances
$98,409 | The Philippines | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Remittances from migrants are among the largest financial flows to developing countries. In 2009, they amounted to $307 billion—an amount roughly two-and-a-half times larger than foreign aid flows. However, little is known about how the development impact of these funds can be maximized.
THE PROJECT: Researchers from the University of Michigan, the World Bank, Italy, and the Philippines, in collaboration with a major Philippine bank remittance channel and a respected Philippine education NGO, will pilot a financial innovation called EduPay, and use a randomized control trial to rigorously test its impact. This new facility will allow overseas Filipinos to pay educational institutions in the Philippines directly from overseas, without channeling the funds through a relative or other “trustee.” The system allows sponsors to monitor the performance (i.e. grades and attendance) of the sponsored student.
PROJECTED COST-EFFICIENCY: Prior evidence suggests that remittances may have greater long-run development impact when migrants are given more control and monitoring over how the funds are used by recipients. This project will test EduPay’s impact on remittance volume, the propensity to finance the education of school-aged children, school attendance and performance.
Click HERE to read the full project description
Saving energy and money: Testing energy audits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in India
$185,533 | India | Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: Rapid industrial growth in emerging economies, especially China and India, has greatly improved the living standards of the average citizen but wrought widespread environmental damage. Globally, India and China will contribute most to future growth in emissions of greenhouse gases. Despite the availability of energy-efficiency investments that can help curb polluting greenhouse gas emissions, many industrial plants and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the developing world fail to undertake these investments.
THE PROJECT: J-PAL South Asia at the Institute for Financial Management and Research will launch a campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in India and encourage energy-efficiency investments that cut both emissions and costs. The project will test two innovations that aim to change the plants’ behavior: detailed energy audits, which identify areas where the plant can profitably save energy, and energy managers that provide skilled technical assistance to help plants implement the audit recommendations. Using a randomized control trial in 400 textile and chemical plants in India’s industrial region, the project will measure the impact of the innovative audits and energy managers on the technology adoption (including plant upgrades) and overall energy use of the plants.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY: The results of the study will shed new light on the way firms make decisions about energy efficiency—an issue that is little understood but very important for climate policy. The study will calculate the financial returns to the plant of the adoption of energy-saving approaches.
An Enriching Experiment: Harnessing nitrogen from the air to improve soil fertility in Ethiopia
$99,854 | Ethiopia | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: The fundamental cause of declining per capita food production in sub-Saharan Africa is the depletion of soil fertility. Approximately 250 million people in the region already suffer from hunger. The price of fertilizers in rural Africa is high, and fertilizer use is low.
THE PROJECT: With Stage 1 support from DIV, Thin Air Nitrogen Solutions, LLC—a start-up company founded by Colorado State University researchers—will collaborate with Hawassa University to pilot test in Ethiopia an alternative, locally-produced biological fertilizer. The fertilizer uses cyanobacteria, which fix nitrogen from the air. The on-farm approach of growing cyanobacteria intensively in ponds and harvesting the culture for use on any crop sidesteps the need for energy-intensive production and transportation infrastructure to get fertilizers to farmers’ fields.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY: The cyanobacterial fertilizer technology is expected to be priced competitively for smallholder farmers.
Click HERE to read the full project description
Improving governance and public service delivery with voter information campaigns
$200,000 | India | Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: The urban poor make up a large proportion of India’s voting population, but like in many developing country democracies, they have not translated their potential political weight into improved public service delivery and other benefits. Evidence suggests that voter information campaigns can mobilize citizens to vote in their interests, but little is known about the influence on politicians’ behavior.
THE PROJECT: With support from DIV, Abhijit Banerjee (MIT) and Rohini Pande (Harvard), with the Institute for Financial Management and Research in Chennai, will use a randomized control trial to evaluate how three novel types of voter mobilization campaigns can empower voters, create accountability mechanisms for politicians and improve services delivery. The work both scales up and furthers previous studies by Banerjee, Pande, and others, which found that information, when publicly available, is highly valued and utilized, with a significant effect on voter behavior. The new study takes the next step of also evaluating changes in politician behavior, service delivery and the wellbeing of constituents. The study will provide some of the first evidence on how Freedom of Information Acts can aid citizen movements to hold politicians accountable.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY: The researchers hypothesize that the campaign will both increase spending totals and shift spending categories to better match voters' wishes. The project will assess the change in spending in treatment wards, which could easily dwarf the cost of the intervention, as well as measure whether residents in the treatment groups had fewer days lost to sickness (e.g. due to dirty water or poor sanitation, and differences in receipt of services such as education, electricity and water).
ALSO FROM OUR PORTFOLIO
The Sanergy solution: Building sustainable sanitation in urban slums
$100,000 | Kenya | Stage 1 | WASH FOR LIFE
THE OPPORTUNITY: 2.5 billion people across the world lack access to basic sanitation. The resulting infection from contact with human waste is the second leading contributor to the global burden of diarrheal disease, claiming the lives of nearly 1.6 million children each year.
THE PROJECT: In the 12-month pilot, Sanergy is building and franchising a dense network of 60 low-cost latrines to slum residents, collecting the waste daily, and processing it as fertilizer and biogas. Designed by MIT engineers and architects, the low-cost, modular hygienic latrines can be assembled in one day. The sanitation centers are franchised to local entrepreneurs and local youth groups. Revenue from the organic fertilizer and biogas energy add to the model's profitability, which has earned awards from MIT, Echoing Green, MassChallenge, and others. Within five years, Sanergy plans to expand to 3,390 centers reaching 600,000 slum dwellers – creating jobs and profit, while aiming to reduce the incidence of diarrhea by 40%.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY: Sanergy’s low-cost latrines are designed to each serve 77 people who will pay for the service. Because the waste from each person generates 22k WH of electricity and 40kg of fertilizer annually, the 10 million people in Kenya’s slums create a potential $72 million market per year.
Click HERE to read the full project description and HERE to read the news story
Putting passengers in the driver’s seat: Preventing road traffic deaths through a public service campaign
$291,154 | Kenya | Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: A low-cost messaging campaign to reduce road accidents in Kenya. Road accidents claim the lives of more than a million people each year worldwide, and are the leading cause of death of young people aged 15-29. By 2030 road accidents are projected to eclipse malaria as the fifth leading cause of death in Africa.
THE PROJECT: Georgetown University, in partnership with a local cell phone company, an insurance company, a broadcast media company and a local NGO, are launching a campaign to reduce the prevalence of road traffic accidents in Kenya. The results of the pilot campaign, which involved 2,400 vehicles, were striking: road accident insurance claims fell by a half, and claims involving injury or death dropped by two-thirds – for a total project price of just $8 per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) saved. Georgetown University will expand the program to reach approximately 10,000 minibuses in Kenya, and conduct a randomized control trial to rigorously assess impact.
PROJECTED COST EFFECTIVENESS: The original trial’s cost effectiveness was $8 per disability-adjusted life year saved. The expanded program is expected to replicate this result.
Click HERE to read the full project description
A bright answer: providing electricity to rural India through renewable micro grids
$300,000 | India | Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: In 2010, the total number of India’s unelectrified households stood at 61 million. Off-grid demand continues to be unmet by modern power services; and communities resort to low quality sources of energy such as kerosene, wood, diesel, candles, and disposable batteries. With the right business model, a company could electrify rural villages in India with power from solar micro-grids
THE PROJECT: DIV is supporting Mera Gao Micro Grid Power (MGP) with a $300,000 grant to construct and operate approximately 40 new village-level micro grid lighting facilities and evaluate their impact on school enrollment, health, and household income. MGP provides its customers with more light points running for more hours each day. The project will reach 4,000 new customers and 20,000 new beneficiaries in Sitapur districts of Uttar Pradesh, India.
PROJECTED COST EFFECTIVENESS: The average off-grid household spends Rs. 150 per month on kerosene, producing dim and dirty lighting from a single kerosene lantern. For Rs. 70 per month, MGP provides its customers with two lights that are more than ten times brighter than a kerosene lantern.
Click HERE to read the full project description.
Trust-building tech: Unlocking credit for African entrepreneurs and small businesses through low-cost technology
$360,294 | Kenya | Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: Access to finance is a critical constraint to the growth of small businesses everywhere, and particularly in poor countries. There is an opportunity to provide entrepreneurs and small business owners with credit to grow their inventories and profits.
THE PROJECT: Tavneet Suri (MIT) and William Jack (Georgetown University) with Warwick University, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and in partnership with a local NGO and bank, Coca-Cola, and Safaricom, will implement and rigorously evaluate a trade credit product for small-scale entrepreneurs in Kenya. The credit product uses a new mobile phone-based money transfer system to lower the transaction costs of lending and borrowing. With DIV support, the researchers will use a randomized control trial to assess the commercial viability of the product, the role of distributors in administering it, and its impact on business development and employment creation. If the intervention is profitable for lenders and borrowers, the project partners are keen to expand the credit product at a much larger scale and to other suppliers. The business model for the product is driven by gains in efficiency for distributors, who can make less frequent, more precisely timed and better managed deliveries to retailers. These static cost savings would be augmented by potential revenue increases from increased sales to participating retailers.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY: The study will estimate the impact of improved access to trade credit on outlets’ orders and sales of the particular product, and will assess changes in creditors and retailers’ profits, employment numbers, transaction costs, and repayment times, among other indicators.
Click HERE to read the full project description.
The life-saving balloon: developing an affordable postpartum hemorrhage treatment to save mothers' lives
$99,793 | Ghana | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Every four minutes, a new mother dies of postpartum hemorrhage. With deaths totaling 140,000 per year worldwide, it is the leading cause of maternal mortality. There is a need to develop and test an affordable, life-saving balloon tamponade that could help combat the leading cause of maternal mortality.
THE PROJECT: DIV is supporting the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health’s (PATH) development of a safe, simple balloon tamponade that would be affordable in the developing world. The tamponade stops hemorrhage and controls uterine bleeding at as much as a 97% reduction in cost. Balloon tamponades can save a woman’s life 76% to 100% of the time, depending on the design. However, with current costs of up to $312 for a single-use tamponade, they are prohibitively expensive for widespread use in developing countries.
PROJECTED COST EFFECTIVENESS: PATH will develop and field test in Ghana an affordable balloon tamponade that costs less than $10, compared to current models used in developed countries that cost between $77 and $312.
Click HERE to read the full project description and HERE to read the press release.
Increasing fertilizer adoption by Kenyan farmers through an innovative pricing scheme
$99,828 | Kenya | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: More than two-thirds of people in Sub-Saharan Africa rely on agriculture for employment and many of them live on small farms and earn less than $1 per day. In Africa, agricultural yields are lower than in than other parts of the world, in part because of the persistently low usage of fertilizer. Identifying ways to increase agricultural incomes is crucial to alleviating poverty.
THE PROJECT: MIT economist, MacArthur Fellow, and John Bates Clark Medal winner, Esther Duflo, in collaboration with colleagues from Harvard University, The University of California Santa Cruz, and Innovations for Poverty Action, will use a randomized control trial to rigorously evaluate an innovative pricing scheme encouraging Kenyan farmers to use fertilizer to increase crop yields. The pricing scheme offers farmers small, time-limited discounts (15%) on fertilizer right after harvest. The timing encourages farmers to purchase fertilizer while they have funds readily available, rather than wait until the next planting season when their cash reserves have depleted.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY: Since the subsidy is 15% the cost of the fertilizer, and the returns to fertilizer average 50-80%, the increase in yields from the fertilizer greatly exceed the cost of the subsidy. Program administration entails minimal cost and simple logistics.
Click HERE to read the full project description
Text for tips: Increasing farmers’ crop yields via an SMS-based knowledge exchange with agricultural extension specialists
$96,394 | Kenya | Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: An estimated 70 percent of the world's poor rely on agriculture for all or some of their household income. Increasing agricultural productivity and incomes are essential steps towards poverty reduction. Cheap and prolific SMS network can be used to give farmers access to expert agricultural knowledge.
THE PROJECT: With support from DIV, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and researchers from Harvard University and Innovations for Poverty Action, in partnership with Kenya’s largest sugar producer, will develop, implement and use a randomized control trial to rigorously evaluate an innovative agricultural extension program to directly reach farmers with agriculture expertise via mobile phones. Mumias Sugar will scale the project if it is proven successful.
PROJECTED COST EFFECTIVENESS: Text messages cost little more than a penny ($0.0125 - $0.0375) per message in Kenya’s competitive mobile phone market. The project will quantify how the access to information improves farmers’ crop yields, then compare the results to program costs to determine cost effectiveness.
Click HERE to read the full project description
Protecting farmers’ incomes through advances in grain storage
$88,400 | Afghanistan | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Losing grains while they are kept in storage, whether to contamination by molds, pests, or other causes, can cost farmers 25%-30% of their yield for the season. In Afghanistan, over 30 million people depend on stored grains for consumption. Improving grain storage yield can help recover significant losses.
THE PROJECT: Purdue University will jumpstart a private sector supply chain in Afghanistan for hermetic grain storage bags that help farmers avoid the storage loss of grains and grain legumes. Purdue’s hermetic grain storage technology is a triple layer bag composed of two inner liners and an outer sack of woven polypropylene, which can almost eliminate grain storage losses from insects and can greatly reduce losses from mold and mildew. The DIV seed grant will enable Purdue to assess the potential profitability and sustainability for hermetic storage bags in Afghanistan.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY: The DIV grant will assess the potential profitability of using hermetic storage bags to reduce grain loss from 25%-30% to 5%-10%.
Click HERE to read the full project description
Save mothers' lives for less: a self-test that detects a leading cause of maternal mortality for a fraction of the price
$100,000 | Nepal | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Develop and test an innovative medical technology to detect a life-threatening condition for expecting mothers who cannot obtain formal prenatal care services. Pre-eclampsia and its more serious progression, eclampsia, are the second leading cause of maternal deaths worldwide, leading to 63,000 maternal deaths and approximately 500,000 newborn deaths annually.
THE PROJECT: Using DIV's grant and leveraging over $518,000 in other funding, Jhpiego, based in Baltimore, MD, is developing an affordable, reliable test to detect proteinuria—a marker of pre-eclampsia—among pregnant women. Current tests are too costly for poor women and involve lab work or multiple trips to the health center. In contrast, this technology uses a special pen to test for pre-eclampsia. The self-test allows for widespread use in the community rather than only in rarely-visited clinics. Jhpiego is refining the technology design and engineering of the Proteinuria Self-test, and conducting a pilot study in a rural district of southern Nepal.
PROJECTED COST EFFECTIVENESS: The pre-eclampsia self-test could be significantly cheaper than currently available tests ($0.0075 per test compared to as much as $0.60 for a comparable test using current practices) and is simple enough for both semi-literate health care workers and pregnant women to use.
Creative cash for crops: testing crop-based financial instruments to open credit to farmers
$230,145 | Sierra Leone | Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: Poor farmers are often forced to sell their crops at harvest time, when prices are lowest, because they need immediate income and lack access to crop storage. There is an opportunity to test an approach that enables rural banks to adapt financial services to increase smallholder farmers' incomes.
THE PROJECT: In partnership with the Government of Sierra Leone and several community banks in Kono and Kailahun districts, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Innovations for Poverty Action are using DIV funding to test a crop-based lending model in which private banks store farmers' crops at the time of harvest as collateral and give loans to the farmers, with the goal of reducing the damaging effects of price seasonality. The research institutions and partners are contributing more than 50 percent of the total cost to implement this project. The approach will be rigorously tested using a randomized control trial of palm oil-producing farmers, who make up half of households in Sierra Leone.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY: Results from a prior pilot study indicate that farmers were able to sell their product at a 50 percent price increase compared to those that did not use the product. The expected outcomes to be measured under this grant are changes in income, investment, savings, and food security among farming households.
Thumbs up: monitoring health worker attendance with fingerprint recognition technology
$173,000 I India I Stage 2
THE OPPORTUNITY: On average across India, health workers are absent 43% of the time, and previous government efforts to encourage attendance have largely failed. Mobile phones can be used to reduce health professional absenteeism while providing real-time rural disease and health data.
THE PROJECT: To reduce health worker absenteeism, the State Government of Karnataka, Harvard, and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab South Asia at the Institute for Financial Management and Research, in Chennai, will use smart phones to capture thumb impressions of health staff as a monitor of daily attendance. The project will also facilitate faster response to emerging health threats by transmitting real time epidemiological data from rural areas to state-level health authorities. A randomized control trial will measure the cost-effectiveness of this program, which, if proven successful, will inform the Government of Karnataka's expressed interest in scaling to the entire state. This project leverages more than $119,844 in other funding and additional in-kind resources.
PROJECTED COST EFFICIENCY – The intervention, with 4.5 million beneficiaries in the treatment group, is designed to reduce health worker and doctor absenteeism below baseline levels (51% for health workers and 61% for doctors). If successful, the Government of Karnataka plans to scale the program across the state (population 52 million). The effects may parallel that of a prior study, which found that when teachers were required to take time-stamped photographs in their classrooms to receive their pay, teacher absenteeism fell by 21 percentage points relative to the control group, and children's test scores increased by 0.17 standard deviations.
COMPLETED GRANTS
Caught on camera: testing how election fraud monitoring might change a cheater's calculus
$99,992 | Afghanistan | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Of the 182 countries ranked on Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index, Afghanistan is ranked 180th—placing it ahead of only North Korea and Somalia. Systemic corruption in government institutions profoundly undermines any development effort in the areas under rule. All development goals drive an imperative to find ways of making corruption more difficult and more expensive – and Afghanistan is one of the hardest environments in which to institute change.
THE PROJECT: A team from the University of California, San Diego received less than $100,000 to measure the effectiveness of an election monitoring approach in Afghanistan. The randomized control trial evaluated how candidates’ and election officials’ behavior would react to the knowledge that their vote counts would be photographed. Following the evidence of the approach's success in Afghanistan, UCSD was able to secure separate funding from Qualcomm to successfully replicate the approach during Uganda's February 2011 presidential and parliamentary elections and Qualcomm plans to expand the approach to some upcoming high-profile elections.
THE RESULTS: The UCSD researchers found a 60% reduction in the theft of election materials and a 25% drop in votes for the most well-connected candidates when polling stations were warned that vote tallies would be monitored with photographs. The result found an efficient means to increase the difficulty and expense of one type of election fraud, compared to the cost of election monitors, and the difficulty of placing an international observer at every polling station. As cellphones become cheaper, the ability of locals to crowd source election monitoring will grow.
Health help in hand: testing a cell phone-based aid for community health workers and data-gathering platform
$100,000 | India | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Provide a scalable mobile health product to enhance community-based efforts to improve maternal and child health
THE PROJECT: The growing ubiquity of mobile phones in the developing world provides opportunity for improving health outcomes in rural areas. Dimagi, a Charlestown, MA-based technology company, has developed an open source mobile and cloud-based platform, CommCare, which goes beyond the scope of most mobile health technologies to provide comprehensive support for health workers in addition to data collection. CommCare allows any community health organization to quickly create and customize health applications and download them onto the phones of community health workers for free use. These applications use multimedia prompts that deliver maternal health education to new mothers, tailored to literacy level and local dialect. DIV's $100,000 contribution to Dimagi has catalyzed the global deployment of CommCare, allowing the technology to be refined for use in 10 countries across the globe and piloted with local implementing partners mobilizing more than $1.5 million in investments directly in CommCare evaluation and scale up over next two years. In addition, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation chose CommCare for their $100 million effort in Bihar.
THE RESULTS: Preliminary calculations indicate that the total cost of ownership for CommCare is $86 per community health worker per year. This cost can be shared by governments, external donors, NGO, or others. The Government of India is currently providing incentives that alone can amount to over $1,000 per health worker per year.
Solar storage: creating clean energy storage systems for developing world contexts
$100,000 | USA | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Expand access to a portable, clean, low-cost energy source for use in developing countries and emergency and disaster relief efforts.
THE PROJECT: With support from DIV and an additional leveraged amount of over $8.5 million, SiGNa Chemistry has developed a power system with a clean and safe energy storage solution tailored to developing country contexts. SiGNa's portable fuel cell is powered by sodium silicide, a powder that instantly produces hydrogen when it comes into contact with water with no hazardous byproducts. Because the only emissions are water vapor and air, such bicycles would not emit the greenhouse gases and pollutants produced by the inefficient engines of other two- and three-wheelers frequently found in cities around the world.
THE RESULTS: The energy storage of the 300 W fuel-cell power system operates at one-sixth the cost, weight, and volume of existing battery technologies. The unit can be carried by hand, can be used indoors, and has a range of potential applications: one canister can power a standard cell phone for 2000 hours with a corresponding fuel cost of $0.0018 per hour, a laptop for 50 hours ($0.07 per hour), an LED light bulb equivalent to a 40W incandescent for 178 hours ($0.0197 per hour) a vaccine refrigerator for 40 hours ($0.0875 per hour), a small UV water filtration system for 133 hours ($0.0036 per gallon of filtered water), or a small mobile work center using 3 computers, 2 light bulbs, 3 phones, a vaccine refrigerator, and a water filtration system for 6 hours ($0.599 per hour). The technology can also be used to efficiently power retrofit bicycles at a cost of $0.045 per mile of bike travel without peddling, thus allowing riders to travel three times further than with an existing battery of a similar size.
The total cost for 3000 Watt-hours of energy from the SiGNa battery is $688, which represents a cost effectiveness gain over existing technologies: gasoline generators cost $1,304 per 3000 W-hrs, disposable batteries cost $41,786 per 3000 W-hrs, and rechargeable lithium batteries cost $2,940 per 3000 W-hrs.
Sun spotlight: providing solar lighting to Uganda's rural cooperatives
$100,000 | Uganda | Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: Leverage existing member cooperatives to provide access to more cost-efficient, cleaner lighting technology.
THE PROJECT: In Uganda's least electrified district of Kalangala, member owned cooperatives are being formed to help get the lights on. With support from DIV and an additional $37,000 in funding and contributions from other partners, Lighting Rural Uganda with Solar (LRUS), a Ugandan NGO, is working through existing structures at the village level to provide retail credit to households to purchase affordable micro-power solar LED lanterns. LRUS will test this distribution model in an area with low levels of electricity. Cheap and stable light sources allow small businesses to operate longer and children to complete schoolwork after dark.
THE RESULTS: While reducing air pollution, LRUS aims to reduce households' kerosene fuel budget and reduce kerosene lantern related fire accidents as households are able to acquire solar lamps. Using the retail credit cooperatives, households acquired more than 3,400 solar lights for home use. A preliminary, self-reported survey of a small sample suggested that in villages where solar lamps were made available, the sale of kerosene in village kiosks dropped and households reported reduced kerosene use and expenditure on fuel, and the reported incidence of fire accidents fell from 64% in a baseline survey population to 20%.
The right to vote right: testing voter education campaigns in India
$100,000 | India| Stage 1
THE OPPORTUNITY: To design and test the effectiveness of a voter education campaign as a way to improve government accountability.
THE PROJECT: Professors Abhijit Banerjee (MIT) and Rohini Pande (Harvard), with the Jameel Poverty Action Lab South Asia at the Institute for Financial Management and Research, are running a randomized control trial to rigorously evaluate whether pre-election voter-education campaigns that provide incumbent qualifications and performance report cards can improve the quality of elected politicians. This project will provide rigorous evidence on the impact of the report cards on electoral outcomes in the 2010 Bihar Assembly elections. In addition to the $100,000 DIV contribution, this project has leveraged $71,000 in other funding and in kind contributions from local NGO Satark Nagrik Sangathan (New Delhi, India) Hindustan, a privately owned newspaper based in New Delhi, India, and other partners.
In Bihar, the poorest state in India, the researchers conducted a voter information campaign that disseminated information on the performance and political backgrounds of 60 randomly selected incumbents through a local high-profile newspaper. The research team used a randomized control trial to evaluate the impact of this campaign on electoral outcomes. These outcomes included incumbent vote-share, voter turnout, campaign expenditures, vote buying and other illegal campaign practices.
THE RESULTS: Preliminary findings suggest that, on average, increased information about incumbent qualifications and performance decreased support for poor-performing candidates. Incumbents who had report cards published about them received 4.6% fewer votes than those who did not. The results will be the basis of a political science paper, currently being prepared, on the role of information in shifting electoral behavior and translated into a policy memo and disseminated to policymakers and civil society organizations, so that future report cards campaigns across India and globally can be designed more effectively.
