Bear Valley Ventures, a grantee of USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) program, is investigating how to radically improve hand hygiene habits in India, through product innovation. Bear Valley and partners created Clean Hands Inc (CHI) to develop new products for the urban poor that can be used by households with substandard or no sanitation and constrained access to water.
Weekly Briefing (6/18/2012 – 6/22/2012) June 18: Last Friday, The Guardian published a story highlighting the importance of advancing water supply and sanitation. USAID’s Chief Innovation Officer, MauraO’Neill, cited the benefit of working with the private sector to address development needs. “Increasingly, we are co-creating solutions [with private companies] around a big, difficult development problem,” O’Neill says. USAID is [...]
Dr. Christopher J. Elias is president and CEO of PATH, an international nonprofit organization that creates sustainable, culturally relevant solutions, enabling communities worldwide to break longstanding cycles of poor health. A new mother experiencing excessive bleeding after childbirth can die within minutes if the bleeding isn’t stopped. For women in developing countries, time too often [...]
Dr. Maura O’Neill is Senior Counselor and Chief Innovation Officer and leads Innovation & Development Alliances at USAID As part of USAID’s 50th Anniversary, the Agency is celebrating Public-Private Partnership Week October 17-21, 2011 to highlight the mutual benefit that development and business have in establishing public-private partnerships (PPP) and to celebrate the 10th anniversary [...]
Recently, USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah delivered an address at the TED annual conference where he noted that “… scientific and technological breakthroughs do more than address specific technical challenges; they inspire collective action by turning impossible challenges into solvable problems”. In my remarks on “Turning Impossible Challenges into Solvable Problems” at the University of [...]
Read the latest edition of USAID’s premier publication, FrontLines for these stories focusing on the Agency’s work in Science and Technology and Climate Change: The United States is helping developing countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve their resilience to the effects of climate change Warns Vermont’s Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy: “We are facing a [...]
Dr. Maura O’Neill is the Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Counselor to the Administrator at USAID. In 2008, the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire brought the issue of unsafe sanitation to the silver screen. Audiences cringed as young Jamal is forced to jump into the open pit of feces in which he was previously seen relieving [...]
