Foggy Bottom has a plan to jump-start a venture-capital approach to the field of humanitarian tech.
When the earthquake decimated Haiti last year, technologists around the world converged online to develop tools to help rescuers find victims and raise funds. Now the State Department wants to see if it can take that impulse and put it to work helping grassroots organizations tackle humanitarian problems around the world even when there isn't a horrible disaster to deal with.
To do that, the State Department is convening a series of “TechCamps” in different parts of the globe this year to bring together non-governmental organizations that know the problems, with technology experts who might have innovative ideas about how to tackle them.
“We saw the ability of digital natives and the networked world, using lightweight and easily iterated tools, to do something rapidly that a big organization or government would find difficult, if not impossible,...
When the earthquake decimated Haiti last year, technologists around the world converged online to develop tools to help rescuers find victims and raise funds. Now the State Department wants to see if it can take that impulse and put it to work helping grassroots organizations tackle humanitarian problems around the world even when there isn't a horrible disaster to deal with.
To do that, the State Department is convening a series of “TechCamps” in different parts of the globe this year to bring together non-governmental organizations that know the problems, with technology experts who might have innovative ideas about how to tackle them.
“We saw the ability of digital natives and the networked world, using lightweight and easily iterated tools, to do something rapidly that a big organization or government would find difficult, if not impossible,...
- 5/4/2011
- by E.B. Boyd
- Fast Company
The introduction of the Div marks a new turn for Usaid and the global aid industry.
The global aid industry got a shake-up last week, with the announcement from the United States Agency for International Development (Usaid) that the Department of Innovation (Div) has been officially launched. The announcement was made at the Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Conference by Usaid Director, Dr. Rajiv Shah, and cemented President Obama's much-anticipated and long-awaited commitments to investing in social innovation.
The new department is operating out of Washington and being led by Harvard Economist, Michael Kremer, and Chief Innovation Officer, Maura O'Neill. The stated goal of the Div is to identify and invest in "high-risk, high-return projects" with scalable social outcomes and in that light the Div has already chosen eight new investees from across the U.S., all of which contribute to sustainable social outcomes in international development.
The investees...
The global aid industry got a shake-up last week, with the announcement from the United States Agency for International Development (Usaid) that the Department of Innovation (Div) has been officially launched. The announcement was made at the Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Conference by Usaid Director, Dr. Rajiv Shah, and cemented President Obama's much-anticipated and long-awaited commitments to investing in social innovation.
The new department is operating out of Washington and being led by Harvard Economist, Michael Kremer, and Chief Innovation Officer, Maura O'Neill. The stated goal of the Div is to identify and invest in "high-risk, high-return projects" with scalable social outcomes and in that light the Div has already chosen eight new investees from across the U.S., all of which contribute to sustainable social outcomes in international development.
The investees...
- 10/12/2010
- by Jenara Nerenberg
- Fast Company
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