A newly crowned winner for the 2013 Dell Social Innovation Challenge has been announced. Solar Conduction Dryer took home the $60,000 grand prize in Austin after competing with four other finalist teams.
The competition aims to recognize undergraduate and graduate students’ socially innovative projects that help communities worldwide.
Solar Conduction Dryer’s solution is to tackle food spoilage so that farmers can keep more of their crops to sell. The team revealed that 25 percent of farmers in India commit suicide as they are trapped in a cycle of poverty, and an idea as simple as saving 20 to 30 percent of their harvest will boost their income.
Because of India’s unreliable electrical infrastructure, the idea uses cost-effective dehydrators powered by solar conduction. Using this method, farmers will also be able to sell dehydrated fruits and vegetables as another source of income.
Second place and a $40,000 prize went to Foot Soldiers which sells affordable shoes for 48 million Bangladeshi who cannot afford proper footwear and are at risk of diseases associated with bare feet.
Good-Benefits.com, a project that helps people make payroll contributions to tax-exempt micro-foundation accounts from which they can give funds over time to nonprofits, took third place and a $20,000 prize.
Two other finalists, Semka Biomedical Technologies and Citizen Power / Sunriding, received $10,000 each to launch their ideas. Semka, a team from Mexico, is developing a device capable of performing tumor biopsies non-invasively through blood extraction. Citizen Power, from Germany, helps ordinary people team up to plan, finance, build, and maintain urban solar installations using an online social platform.
Source and photo: Dell Inc.
