Click here to watch the Tech Awards Gala Live: Nov 12, 7 p.m. PST 

The Tech Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity is an annual humanitarian award program recognizing technical solutions that benefit humanity and address the most critical issues facing our planet and its people. Each year, the program honors 25 global innovators (Laureates) who are applying technology to benefit humanity in five categories: Education, Equality, Environment, Economic Development, and Health. Although The Tech Awards program is year-round, it culminates each November in a Gala event, where five of the 25 Laureates—one in each category—receive a $50,000 cash prize.  Since 2003, twelve DM projects have become Tech Award Laureates.

Now that your project is a success, you’re going to want to do more of it to impact more people in more and different contexts. How do you do it?
 

I am really in a rush, I am leaving Vientiane to participate in The Tech Award ceremony, organized by The Tech Museum in San Jose, California in the next hours. We were selected as a Laureate for one of our innovative concept of selling Light per hour with portable battery lanterns charged by a central village charging station operated by a village entrepreneur. Let me introduce briefly the idea. I will continue to describe the approach more in detail in the next days.  Sunlabob is a renewable energy company based in Laos. Sunlabob directly replaces kerosene for lighting in Lao villages with solar lanterns. Kerosene is a small steady expense of poor rural households and over a year adds up to one of their main cash-expenses. The combined use of huge numbers of kerosene lamps in rural areas results in a major carbon footprint of most developing countries. Sunlabob intends to enter this potential mass market.
 

BATTANPUN, Cambodia – Some 30 people gathered in late February 2008 to talk about their experience using a rope pump that was introduced to the village a few months earlier. Many stopped by on their way home from the fields, asked questions and considered the pump.

In this village two hours north from Cambodia’s capital, a population of about 300 does not have many options for clean, safe water. Open wells are often contaminated and many of the region’s tube wells contain high levels of arsenic

But Battanpun’s water situation has improved, since local NGO Ideas at Work (IaW) installed a rope pump on one of the village open wells. Since then, four pumps have been sold to groups of families.

On October 22, 2008 fifty winners were announced at the end of this year China Development Marketplace entitled “Supporting Grassroots Innovations for a Harmonious Society.”  With a total award pool of US $ 1 million, this competition identified efforts targeting poverty reduction and addressing development challenges towards building a harmonious society.

Almost 500 applicants from all over China submitted their ideas on how to best reduce poverty, illustrating the large numbers of innovative, local solutions.  The 115 finalists with the best ideas were invited to Beijing for the two-day competition to showcase and share their unique ideas.  In addition to a grant competition, finalists also participated in a Knowledge Forum to help these groups expand their skills and knowledge and to promote networking among them.
 

We recently held a session on linking communities to markets during the Development Marketplace 2008 with about 40 finalists from all over the world.  This was an excellent session and well received, but I realized one thing during the event: When you discuss how to link communities to markets, you’re assuming that the communities are mobilized, are actively participating in the project, and feel a sense of ownership.  But how do you get to that point?

To be quite honest, if someone says they have a fool-proof way to mobilize communities into sustainable institutions, I would not believe them.  We have learned from experience, however, and I’ll share some of that with you know.  Hopefully, people will respond with examples of their own. 

Application deadline:
November 4, 2008

The Skoll Foundation announces that November 4, 2008 is the deadline for receipt of applications for the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. The Foundation is looking for social entrepreneurs whose work has the potential for large-scale positive change in the areas of tolerance and human rights, health, environmental sustainability, peace and security, institutional responsibility, and economic and social equity.  Within these issues, it is particularly interested in applications from social entrepreneurs working in five critical sub-issue areas that threaten the survival of humanity – climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, conflict in the Middle East and water scarcity. Award winners will be celebrated at the annual Skoll World Forum following their selection, at the end of March 2009 in Oxford, England.

Once you complete your project, there’ll be time for reflection and celebration but not too much! Likely your project has successfully piloted a new innovation but it remains just that, a pilot. Peoples’ lives will have been changed and you’ll have learned an enormous amount, so now the challenge is to have an even bigger impact by helping change the existing paradigm in your field or in the region where you work. When conceiving your project and in your DM application, you’ll have identified how you thought you could scale up but now that you’ve implemented your project, you’ll have refined your thinking through lessons learned and so will now have a much more concrete and defined idea of what you need to scale up.
 

Submission Deadline: October 20, 2008

Google launched Project 10 to the 100th an initiative to identify and fund ideas in the following eight categories: