‘Tis the season for awards. The Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation
Project Winners were announced at the Global Philanthropy Forum earlier this week. 100 Million Stoves, which won first place, is a simple, wireless, stove-use monitoring system that can be attached to the millions of new low-emission stoves being used in developing regions. FrontlineSMS:Credit, the second place winner, has the potential to open up financial services and micro-financing to millions of people in the developing world. And third place winner Sana, formerly Moca, is a multidisciplinary group based out of MIT that developed an open source platform allowing mobile phones to capture and send data for an electronic medical record and links community health workers with physicians for real-time decision support. During a ceremony also at the Global Philanthropy Forum, Aravind Eye Care Systems, the 2010 recipient of the Hilton Humanitarian Prize, received its $1.5 million award and the Prize sculpture.
In addition the Goldman Environmental Foundation announced the six recipients of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize this week. This year’s recipients include Thuli Brilliance Makama of Swaziland, who won a landmark court case to include environmental NGO representatives in conservation decisions; Tuy Sereivathana, who worked with communities in Cambodia to find innovative, low-cost solutions to protect Asian elephants; Małgorzata Górska of Poland, who led the fight to protect Poland’s Rospuda Valley — one of Europe’s last remaining wilderness areas — from a controversial highway project; Humberto Ríos Labrada of Cuba, who promoted sustainable agriculture by working with farmers to increase crop diversity and develop low-input systems without agrochemicals; Lynn Henning of Michigan, who exposed the polluting practices of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and gained the attention of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, prompting state regulators to issue hundreds of citations for water-quality violations; and Randall Arauz of Costa Rica, who led a campaign to halt inhumane and environmentally catastrophic shark finning, making his country the international model for shark protection. See their photos and read more about the recipients at the Goldman Prize web site.