How social entrepreneurs are using technology to accelerate change

Bright Simons, president and co-founder of mPedigree, and co-founder Selorm Branttie tackle the issue of counterfeit drugs and seeds through what might seem like a simple technology at first glance.

If you’re purchasing medicines or cosmetics or if you’re a farmer in Kenya about to plant some seeds, mPedigree allows you to use your mobile phone and an application to confirm that the product is certified, original, and safe — all through a simple text message, explained Simons at the Forum.

By some estimates, 25% of medicines are fake, which means they’re either not going to heal you, or they’re going to make you worse. About 30% of seeds planted are of poor quality, meaning that if you plant them, you’re not going to get the right harvest, Simons said.

With the Skoll Award funding, Simons hopes to build more value-adding technologies. “We’re particularly interested in predicting counterfeit medicines before they harm people or predicting counterfeit seeds before they completely damage the livelihood of farmers,” he said. Such a solution would include a lot of data analytics work, algorithm development, and investment into spin-off companies that focus on even more high-tech ways of improving people’s lives, he said.

Simons stressed the need for cooperation and awareness at every level, from medicine manufacturers and seed growers, to retailers and consumers. Perhaps most importantly, he said, they need government support.

“Regulation is truly the domain of governments. We need them to integrate with our platform, so that if consumers report and encounter counterfeit products, government can spring into action right away.”

Another Ghana-based entrepreneur and Skoll Award winner, Gregory Rockson, is looking to tackle health system inefficiencies. He moved back to his native Ghana after graduating from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, to “embark on this crazy journey of trying to build a private sector approach to fixing the drug supply chain in Africa.”

In 2013, he founded health tech startup mPharma. The company manages prescription drug inventory for pharmacies to limit stock-outs by using data to predict demand. They currently operate across Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria, and 260 community pharmacies, so-called “mom-and-pop” pharmacies, have signed up for their services.

“By centralizing the risk around supply chain into one entity, which is mPharma, we would be able to eliminate the issue of stock-outs and leverage the aggregation and purchasing power across all the partner pharmacies that join our network to be able to push back on negotiating better prices with manufacturers and distributors,” Rockson said.

A lack of government regulation in the public sector has forced more and more people to seek their medication from private sector providers.

Many African countries have adopted a free pricing market and there’s often a lack of fixed drug prices — normally set by governments. As a result, a consumer can walk into two pharmacies right next to each other and find the same drug available at widely different prices, Rockson explained.

He believes the biggest challenge to achieving universal health coverage will come from governments not being able to fix their cost structures to deliver accessible and high-quality health care services.

The World Health Organization’s agenda in recent years has focused on addressing drug access and shortages, but unexpected health expenses still push some 100 million people into extreme poverty. WHO has also outlined that good governance, good procurement systems, and a reliable and sufficient supply of medicines and health technologies are critical elements to achieving universal health coverage.

One of the underlying issues with drug stock-outs and inefficient supply chains is the lack of data management, Rockson said. By collecting consumption data from hundreds of partner pharmacies, mPharma can forecast demand for drugs and ensure efficiency in shelving products.

For South Africa-based Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator — whose work focuses on connecting high-potential young people to employer networks — technology is both part of the problem and the solution.

“We also need to be in the job-making business and finding ways to create opportunities that young people can find their way into, even if those are entry points that might lead them to other things,” said Maryana Iskander, CEO at Harambee.

She believes that we’re still in the early days of understanding how technology will change the nature of work. There’s no doubt that automation in many sectors is replacing more repetitive tasks, which means that the work of the future will require higher-order human skills, she said.

Harambee takes a pragmatic approach to technology.

“We live in a society with significant constraints on what technology enables and empowers,” Iskander said. “We have some of the highest data costs in the world, and certainly on the African continent, and that does limit the idea that young people on a phone can download an app and sort out their employability.”

Harambee built a multichannel platform where young people looking for work can use their phones to send a free “please call me” message to connect to their call centers.

“The idea is to let our data come in whichever way works for the young person and to be able to then use some of the most sophisticated technology to glean insights and understand from that information how the data that we’ve stored is going to help us make those matches more successful,” Iskander explained.

Bob Filbin is the co-founder and chief data scientist at Crisis Text Line, a 24/7 counseling text line. “We’re the first crisis organization to be built from the ground up around data and technology,” he explained.

“We think about the ways we can do things more efficiently and at scale. That brings a lens that allows us to find efficiencies that we cannot only give to ourselves as an organization but share with other crisis centers,” Filbin said.

Co-founder and CEO Nancy Lublin hopes Crisis Text Line will become the tech and infrastructure provider to local leaders around the world. It’s providing a stack, or data structure, that local leaders couldn’t otherwise build and maintain, she said. “It’s also a network, so we can all learn best practices,” said Lublin. “We’re really excited to tell truth through data around the world.”

Crisis Text Line currently operates in the U.S., U.K., and Canada — where their service is offered both in French and English. They plan to launch in 15 countries in the next three years and in 30 countries in the next five.

Through their data, they’ve identified trends and insights related to suicidal ideation, when depression happens, seasonality, time-of-day differences, as well as the scope of issues such as sexual assault as an underlying reason for mental illness.

“Countries are unique; even within countries there are pockets of uniqueness,” Lublin said. “Our hope is to build technology that can cover all of that and then partner with the right people to lead locally.”

It’s a small team, with a third of the staff working in tech or data. “We have the power of hundreds of million messages sitting behind us,” Filbin explained. “It’s not about the size of the team so much as the size of the data that makes us unique.”

One of their most surprising findings is that the word “suicide” is not as much of an indicator of risk as other words, such as “bridge” or references to painkillers. The Crisis Text Line algorithm uses natural language processing to determine risk level and elevates the most at-risk texter to the top of the queue for quick support.

Julie Cordua heads up Thorn, a platform that defends children from sexual abuse by scanning online data and images to help law enforcement find child victims and to identify the children most at risk. A nonprofit, it actually looks a lot like a software company, Cordua explained.

“We build technology to fight online child sexual abuse, so we’re looking at the way technology facilitates child sex trafficking, the spread of child sexual abuse material, and then emerging crimes with new technologies like live streaming sex abuse, considering what virtual reality abuse will look like, and really trying to address those crimes and build technology solutions to combat the spread of them.”

There are millions of files on the internet today documenting child sexual abuse, said Cordua. “The question we’re trying to ask ourselves is which represent children who need to be rescued right now.”

Thorn’s cloud-based solution is ready to rapidly scale globally as law enforcement agencies can easily implement it, she said. Collaboration is a vital part of their work, and they see themselves as empowering frontline people, NGOs who work with children, law enforcement, and private companies. “We see ourselves as that engine that can help those on the frontline do this work.”

The Skoll funding allows Thorn to build the engineering teams to make those platforms stable enough for rapid global scale.

“If you start to look at other areas that have massive amounts of publicly available data, it can be anything where the internet is the market place. You can apply that same way of thinking to gathering the data,” Cordua said. “Then you start to learn the patterns in it, and what the signals are that would help you focus in on the area of most urgency.”