Innovating for Scale: Three Development Engineering Technologies that are Improving Lives
This post, written by CEGA Program Manager Sam Fishman with input from CEGA Executive Director and DIL Managing Director Carson Christiano, describes three superstar technologies that have emerged from the USAID-funded Development Impact Lab (DIL), co-managed by CEGA. We offer these case studies to highlight opportunities for transformative impact at scale and as examples of how the revolutionary “Development Engineering (DevEng)” approach can be used to address global poverty.
With support from USAID, the Development Impact Lab (DIL) was launched in 2012 with the goal of “Accelerating the creation, testing, and scaling up of transformative innovations, technologies and approaches in development solutions.” To date, the program has supported over 100 interdisciplinary research projects in over 45 countries. Many of these projects have yielded new technologies and/or business models that promise to improve the health and well-being of millions living in poverty. A new field of study, Development Engineering (DevEng), has emerged from this work, along with a forthcoming textbook and masters program at UC Berkeley to guide and support researchers in innovating for scale.
Today, many DIL projects have passed the “creation” and/or “testing” phases of the DevEng approach. We showcase three of these exciting projects below. Now, we invite other leaders across the development community, especially governments, NGOs, and donors to help us seize the opportunities DIL has generated to thoughtfully and cost-effectively bring these promising technologies to scale.
Electro-Chemical Arsenic Remediation (ECAR)
A technology (and business model) with the potential to make drinking water safe for tens of millions.
Arsenic is a naturally occurring water contaminant that threatens the health of hundreds of millions globally, particularly in India and Bangladesh where tens of millions of shallow tube wells have tapped into contaminated aquifers. Chronic exposure can lead to internal cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other serious adverse health effects. Ashok Gadgil’s team at UC Berkeley developed the ECAR technology using electricity and steel plates to produce a particular kind of rust particles in the contaminated water. Arsenic strongly binds to these rust particles, allowing for effective filtration of arsenic. This method has a number of advantages over alternatives (see the list on the Gadgil Labs ECAR homepage).
With DIL funding, researchers went beyond a lab prototype, working closely with local partners in India to build a demonstration plant at Dhapdhapi High School near Kolkata. The goal was to investigate the viability of the technology in the real world, while testing a business model that could propel the technology to scale. In January 2017, after years of iterative research and testing, the ECAR team successfully transferred management of the demonstration plant to a local private sector partner. Today, the plant continues to provide arsenic-free water to the school free of charge, serving 2,500 students and 400 staff and parents daily. The plant sells excess safe-water to the local community covering all costs and making a modest profit. The research team has since published a number of papers on the ECAR work, including a 2019 paper on the India case study.
Now, in light of this success, the ECAR research team is actively seeking committed funding and implementation partners to help them test the business model at a larger scale. Gadgil notes that “We’ve done the research, we’ve done the invention, we’ve filed the patents, we’ve done field testing, and we’ve shown that it works. Now we need help to make sure it goes into the hands of the private sector so it can scale up rapidly through public private partnerships.” Ideally, the next step for ECAR would be an investment in the scale-up of the approach with a strong impact evaluation component, which would hasten the impacts of the innovation while allowing researchers to carefully study the long-term health benefits of the model.
For more information about ECAR, see this short video, visit the DIL project page, or contact Siva Bandaru (sivaram.satyam@berkeley.edu).
We Care Solar
An innovation bringing power into the hands of maternal healthcare workers in regions with unreliable electricity.
300,000 mothers lose their lives every year in childbirth and around one million newborns don’t make it past their first day. Lack of electricity plays a part in these tragedies. Without electricity, medical devices are not used, blood can’t be stored, cell phones aren’t charged to contact emergency personnel, and emergency healthcare isn’t delivered at critical moments of life or death for pregnant women.
We Care Solar founder Laura Stachel’s team addressed this problem by developing “Solar Suitcases,” portable user-friendly solar electric kits designed to provide power for reliable lighting, mobile communications and medical devices in obstetric care settings. With support from DIL and other partners, We Care Solar has developed three generations of the Solar Suitcase technology and scaled the product to over 6,300 health centers in fifty countries (see additional impact metrics and the latest research on the intervention on the We Care Solar website).
Today, valuable opportunities to study the technology and document its impacts of maternal and child health at scale abound. DIL is eager to support We Care Solar in finding the right donors as well as implementation and research partners to take this innovation to the next level. Further, as the suitcases experience wear and need to be maintained, public-private partnerships could help We Care Solar expand and test models aimed at building capacity of health care workers to maintain and troubleshoot solar suitcases over the long-term.
For more information about We Care Solar, see our DIL project page or contact Dr. Laura Stachel (laura@wecaresolar.org).
CellScope
Using cellphones and microscopes to diagnose disease
One of DIL’s signature innovations is CellScope, a portable diagnostic tool designed and field-tested by UC Berkeley Professor Dan Fletcher and team. By harnessing the power of light microscopes and mobile phones, as well as advancements in phone image processing, CellScope makes it possible to diagnose a range of life-threatening diseases, including parasites, tuberculosis, malaria, ocular diseases, and even COVID-19 at the point-of-care. While convenient anywhere, the innovation is transformative in remote, low-resource settings where patients would otherwise have to travel long distances to get to a hospital (an expense of time and money they often can’t afford).
With support from DIL, the CellScope team has been able to develop and field-test adaptations of the technology for diagnosing Loa Loa parasites, tuberculosis (of which there were 10 million active cases in 2018), and COVID-19. The CellScope technology has been tested in Vietnam, Cameroon, Uganda, Cote D’Ivoire, and the US, leading to numerous findings and publications (for example, see papers Cellscope diagnostics for TB, Schistosomiasis and Loa Loa). Remarkably, the simple point-of-care screening method for Loa Loa, which is now being scaled in a number of countries with support from the Gates Foundation, requires minimal sample prep and can produce diagnostic results within five minutes. The team is now working to develop and test the device for schistosomiasis, which affected 236.6 million people in 2019.
Today, with COVID-19 reinforcing the need for technologies that allow low-resource communities to respond to deadly outbreaks, we invite interested funding and implementation partners to learn more about CellScope. We believe that in the face of deadly diseases like TB and malaria, CellScope could provide enormous social returns on investment if implemented on a larger scale.
Taking DIL innovations to the next level
ECAR, We Care Solar, and CellScope are only three of many DIL innovations that, after significant investments in iterative design and field testing, are poised for implementation (and further testing) at scale. We hope that donors interested in transforming public health in low-resource settings will take interest in the remarkable potential of these innovations to cost-effectively improve health and well-being for millions. Often, innovations can get stuck in the ideation and prototyping phases. Finding the “newest” technology to catalyze change can be exciting. However, these case studies represent mature opportunities for donors who are not just interested in discovering exciting new innovations, but also making sure the most promising innovations reach their potential in impacting the lives of the most vulnerable.
