Turning Fish Poop to Fish Food
Incredible ideas need incredible platforms. UNLEASH+ is a new project that supercharges prototyped ideas and gives them the extra attention — and exposure — they need to succeed.
SHENZHEN, CHINA — A child in a remote village in northern Uganda, 5 years old, was convulsing with symptoms of malaria, his temperature sky high. The village was so remote that he and his mother would never have been able to get to a hospital in time to deal with the medical emergency. Even if they could have, they would not have had the money to pay for the ride (nor pay for the treatment).
But they were able to get to a relatively close, rurally stationed OneDay Health outpost, where the boy received medication and treatment that was “good enough to save his life because it was managed quickly,” noted Emmanuel Ochola, a One DayHealth team member and nurse by training.
OneDay Health was ideated at the inaugural edition of UNLEASH Innovation Lab in 2017 in Denmark. UNLEASH annually convenes 1,000 millennial thought leaders from around the world to ideate solutions to the planet’s most intractable problems, particularly those tied to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (in this case, SDG3, Health).
But the OneDay Health team is back again for UNLEASH 2019 in Shenzhen, China. For the first time in its three-year history, UNLEASH has added a new track called UNLEASH+. The teams competing in UNLEASH+ are teams that participated in previous editions of UNLEASH but that now “have a prototyped solution that can really make the gauges move on the SDGs,” said Gregory Pepper, the UNLEASH+ Lead.
microTERRA is another solution that was launched in a previous UNLEASH and is now currently competing in the UNLEASH+ track. The Mexico-based microTERRA develops micro-algae systems that transform waste water into sustainable protein and clean water. Or, as founder Marissa Cuevas Flores put it more simply, “We turn fish poop into fish food.”
Inland fish farmers in Mexico (raising primarily tilapia) face astonishing costs related to dirty water (water dirtied by fish excrement): 30% of the water in their fish tanks needs to be replaced every day, which is responsible for 70% of their operating expenses. The revolutionary technology — which is installed on site to avoid transportation costs — provides massive savings for creating an inexpensive, renewable source of food for the fish.
“We started with fish because it was the lowest technical barrier,” said Cuevas. “But this technology can be adapted to other animals — pigs, cows, poultry — and that would be a game changer.”
A game changer is what is needed in sub-Saharan Africa, as the population is exploding and there are not sufficient methods available to feed the growing numbers. But Champions for Inclusive Green Growth has a variety of answers. First among those is to attract youth to farming.
“Currently, the youth are not interested in farming,” noted UNLEASH alumni Didas Mzirai of Kenya. “Farming is not sexy — it isn’t cool. We are trying to make farming sexy for the youth.”
One methodology for making farming “cool” to younger people is to give it a tech edge.
“We have a Digital Farmer program,” said Mzirai, who had a different program when he was at UNLEASH previously, as did his teammates, Diana Kendi, also of Kenya, and Solomon Mutasa, of Zimbabwe. “That program will empower youth with ICT skills, including how to use ICT for markets all through the value chain. And then there is an agro-tourism component. These aspects could attract youth to farming — to make it ‘cool.’”
“We want them to feel empowered, particularly the rural women farmers,” said Kendi, who noted that 50% of farmers in Africa are women. “We want to provoke their minds.”
OneDay Health, microTERRA, and Champions for Inclusive Green Growth are very different in nature, and yet will be competing in UNLEASH+ for a $10,000 prize next week in the track’s UNLEASH premiere. But despite their differences, the ideas — along with SaniHive, Go Viral, and roughly another 15 teams — share quite a few similarities: they are all social-good enterprises in relative start-up mode that could benefit from expert counsel, peer-to-peer learning, exposure to innovators in a cutting-edge city like Shenzhen, and assistance in the investor-pitching phase. Those four areas are precisely the topics on the menu at UNLEASH+.
“The needs of each of these teams are very specific,” said Pepper. “We support each team in a unique way and in the way they need.”
The program kicked off with remote support for the accepted teams, a nine-week engagement that assessed teams, and helped focus on the user, the ecosystem, and the solution itself.
Once the teams arrived in Shenzhen this week, the focus shifted to the four areas noted above, with more hands-on learning and deep dives, including the benefit of expert (or “master”) clinics in granular areas (such as around finance) and peer-to-peer learnings, where teams would benefit from hearing what their fellow talents brought to the table.
“Ultimately,” said Pepper, “we want to give them the right tools, and expose them to the right markets. Once they leave here, they will have formed a business plan.”
