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Chaordix Crowdsourcing Part of Global Humanitarian Effort to Save Lives of Millions of Mothers and Newborns

chaordix [1]Chaordix [1]® has announced their participation in an innovative crowdsourced international development program to help save maternal and neonatal lives in the poorest regions on earth. The second phase of the Saving Lives at Birth [2]: A Grand Challenge for Development initiative is seeking to elicit and fund innovative approaches and technologies that dramatically reduce risks to women and their newborns during the most vulnerable hours immediately after birth.

In partnership with DAI [3], Chaordix® has brought their Crowd Intelligence™ process and advanced technology platform to this program in order to effectively distill the ideas of Grand Challenge participants into actionable insights. Submitted solutions from program participants in the online crowdsourcing community should be unconventional, low-cost, scalable and measurable.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and their partners are seeking to harness the ingenuity and expertise of non-traditional innovators and partners, including the private sector. USAID, the Government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and the UK Department for International Development came together to launch the program in March 2011. The program has already found and funded a range of ingenious solutions, including a simple low-cost umbilical cord cleansing intervention that, once scaled up, has the potential to save an estimated half a million newborn lives each year.

Shelley Kuipers, Chaordix® Founder and CEO, said, “As a mother and business leader, I am honoured that our team and I can support our partners in finding practical solutions to save the lives of so many newborn babies and their moms in developing countries.” She added, “When we can help make ground-breaking programs like this come to life, I truly marvel at how far both crowdsourcing and our company have advanced.”

For this second, newly launched phase of Saving Lives at Birth: A Grand Challenge for Development, solutions will address three key roadblocks: 1) lack of access to appropriate medical technologies, 2) too few trained health caregivers, and 3) lack of preventative information for mothers. Drawing from the partners’ investment some 25 seed grants and 5 transition-to-scale grants are to be awarded.