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2008 muhammad yunus innovation challenge:
Improving Indoor Air Quality to Break the Cycle of Poverty

Indoor air quality is a concern around the world and affects predominantly the poor in their homes and workplaces. Exposure is strongly tied with burning solid fuels, a practice common to three billion people worldwide, half of whom are in India and China. In many African countries, more than 90% of the population uses solid fuel. Worldwide deaths attributed to air pollution are on a level with those caused by malaria and tuberculosis. Indoor air pollution is not indiscriminate; the devastating effects are most strongly felt by women and children. For children under five, for example, acute lower respiratory infections are the leading cause of death worldwide. More than half of those infections are related to indoor air pollution.

This year's Yunus Innovation Challenge focuses on improving indoor air quality to break the cycle of poverty. Indoor air pollution kills 1.6 million people per year, yet efforts to prevent, monitor, improve the situation remain seriously understudied relative to other global health issues on a comparable level. There is ample opportunity for innovation in public awareness, technical interventions, monitoring programs, and more, to reach the estimated three billion poor worldwide who are affected by pollutant levels often 100 times greater than the recommended thresholds.

The 2008 Yunus Innovation Challenge calls for improving indoor air quality to break the cycle of poverty. Solutions should be designed for implementation in communities living at or below the poverty level.

background

Infectious diseases affect everyone. Yet a strong relationship exists between poverty, an unhygienic environment, and the number of episodes and severity of illness. The health cost of infectious diseases is tremendous and falls disproportionately on young children. Diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory infections are the leading causes of preventable death among children under five in developing countries, claiming the lives of more than 3.5 million children a year.

Hands are a common vector for disease transmission. Studies suggest that transforming good hand hygiene from an abstract idea into an automatic behavior performed in homes, schools and communities worldwide has the potential to save more lives than any single vaccine or medical intervention, interrupting the transmission path of disease and helping to prevent more than 1 million child deaths per year.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cleaning hands is "the single most important means of preventing the spread of infection," yet recent studies and reports indicate that lack of hand hygiene contributes significantly to disease transmission.

Despite interventions that make cleaning hands less costly, many barriers remain in place to widespread adoption of such practices. Challenges to overcome include:

  • inertia in adopting hygiene practices
  • cost and availability of resources
  • cultural barriers such as social norms and preferences

One way to address the issue is through innovations in technology. For solid fuel use in the kitchen, product development and case studies have focused on smokeless stoves and solar cooking. Although recognized as potential contributors to the global fight of respiratory illness, there is a lack of consensus on their effectiveness. Other factors limiting uptake may include difficulty in maintenance and low cultural acceptability, which may signify a need for more appropriate designs.

It may come as no surprise that afflictions tied to the solid fuels used for cooking affect women in poverty, who spend between three and seven hours per day at a household fire. The impact on children is, if anything, even greater, and exacerbated by several factors. Young children spend most of their time with their mothers, often strapped to their bodies. As they are not fully developed, they have smaller airways susceptible to inflammation, breathe faster, and have weaker immune systems relative to healthy adults. Children therefore absorb pollutants more readily than adults and also retain them in their system for longer.

Conventional particulate sensors cost anywhere between $50 and $300 in the US. For a large-scale or long-term monitoring solution, particularly in the developing world, this cost is unacceptable. Innovations leading to low-cost monitoring and evaluation systems would make significant contributions towards understanding the details of where the greatest impacts are, the scale of the problem, and how effective technical or behavioral intervention programs are.

Due to limitations in financial or organizational capacity, there is a worldwide paucity of large-scale data in indoor air pollution, particularly in the home. Roles to continue monitoring and disseminating data for better understanding are going unfulfilled or inadequately fulfilled. Even in areas where funds are available and programs are ongoing to monitor air pollution in public places (e.g. schools) or in large-scale studies including homes, getting the data into the hands of those who would use it for research or public intervention is still a challenge. This is an issue that exists in a variety of fields and in countries all over the world, but the lack of information is most keenly felt when health is at risk and budgets are limited.

key considerations

The issues surrounding indoor air quality are fairly complex, and present a variety of opportunities for innovation, including:

  • the strong cultural and social foundations for fuel practices
  • the lack of availability and higher cost of cleaner fuels
  • understanding of the connection between health issues and personal practices
  • low quantity and availability of data to analyze or publicize the problem, or measure the effectiveness of intervention

It is not expected that proposed solutions will address all issues surrounding indoor air quality. However, Yunus Challenge solutions should address a particular need and fill it well. Participants are encouraged to work on a design with a specific community or region in mind as this can be helpful in identifying constraints and providing context.

subject reading

There are several additional sources of information (see bottom of page), but in particular participants are encouraged to read the following materials.

the global burden of indoor air pollution

Indoor air pollution is the one of the greatest health threats in the developing world, claiming 1.6 million lives each year in addition to contributing to 2.7% of the world's global disease burden. Like tuberculosis and malaria, indoor air pollution is considered an affliction of the poor: 80% of world exposure to particulate pollution occurs inside in developing countries. The majority of the afflicted are women and young children, and they are disproportionately poor. The burden includes approximately 1 million deaths by acute lower respiratory infection in children, and a high incidence of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in women. These deaths and illnesses are preventable.

Preliminary readings include the following:

videos

supporting initiatives

Opportunities are available for students who want to learn more about the Yunus Innovation Challenge and the context in which a solution should operate. Students are encouraged to apply for Public Service fellowships, internships and grants that provide them with the opportunity to work on a potential program and with communities to develop a feasible solution which takes local context into account. For more information, please contact Alison Hynd at hynd@mit.edu.

For additional support in gathering information about the local context, customs and conditions of a specific community or country, participants may leverage the expertise of D-Lab teams that have encountered indoor air pollution, especially from indoor cooking, in sites ranging from India to Brazil. In India, students may have an opportunity to visit a non-governmental organization that includes improved stoves in its technology portfolio.. For more information, please contact d-lab-trip-leaders@mit.edu.

Participants also may enter proposals into the IDEAS Competition, where two special awards have been created to provide winning teams with funding to pursue their ideas. These opportunities are again made possible through the generous support of MIT alumnus, Mr. Mohammed Jameel. For more information, please contact Lars Hasselblad at ideas-admin@mit.edu. Further information on the IDEAS Competition as it pertains to the 2008 Yunus Innovation Challenge follows immediately below.

ideas competition criteria

The Yunus Innovation Challenge IDEAS Award for 2008 will be given to participants who create an innovative solution that solves as many of the problems as possible surrounding unhealthy indoor air quality for those living in poverty.

As the challenge focuses on air quality issues among the world's poorest populations, solutions should aim for a price point that makes intervention accessible to target communities (who are located for the most part in low-income nations with poor infrastructure) and allows for dissemination on a large-scale.

As with all IDEAS awards, innovation, feasibility and impact will be important criteria in judging. Specific issues to address include, but should not necessarily be limited to:

  • Affordability
  • Acceptability within the community (i.e., likelihood of adoption)
  • Health impact
  • Environmental impact
  • Scalabity

Credit will be given for supporting rationale regarding how the solution will directly address the issues faced. For example, this rationale could include why the team decided to focus particular attention on solving one aspect of the challenge. However, if a team decides that another factor is equally significant, supporting evidence for this factor also should be provided.

While not required, the solution may involve a physical device. The system should be designed to operate in conditions prevalent in poor households and communities where basic hygiene is limited. Again, participants are encouraged to work on a design with a specific community or region in mind as this can be helpful in identifying constraints and providing context.

Resources

A sampling of resources for participants about energy and energy storage in the developing world follows. There are many more available, so please do not hesitate to ask!

Organizations
Other resources:

For assistance in finding additional resources specific to your project, please contact an MIT librarian.

For more information on the 2010 Yunus Innovation Challenge, please contact Laura Sampath at lsampath@mit.edu