Innovation, for every child

Season 4, episode 7

Innovation, for every child

From autonomous airships to open-source AI mapping hard-to-reach areas and a compression garment developmed by NASA saving the lives of thousands of mothers worldwide - what role does innovation play at an organization like UNICEF?

In this episode we speak to entrepreneurs and innovators - all working to make a better world for children. 

Host: Saara Chaudry

Guests: 

Bo Percival, Senior Advisor, Innovation, UNICEF

Stephani Sy, Founder, Thinking Machines

Spencer Horner, founder & CEO, Cloudline

Producers: Sara Faruqi and Priyadarshini Mitra

Composed and mixed by: Chandra Bulucon

Transcript: 

[00:00:00.08] Six months pregnant, with twins, and living in a remote location in Papua New Guinea, Susan walked for four days through winding, mountainous roads, crossed a river, and then a flooded swamp just so she could be near a health center before giving birth. She had already seen five women die in her village from complications after birth and being unable to reach health care on time.

[00:00:25.40] [HEAVY BREATHING]

[00:00:30.74] I didn't want to die so I made the journey, she says. And she would be glad she did. Three months later, she safely delivered her first twin at the health center with the help of a midwife and volunteer. However, when the time came to deliver the second twin, she began to lose blood rapidly - a sign of postpartum hemorrhaging.

[00:00:53.60] A district health manager quickly used a non-pneumatic anti-shock garment to stop the bleeding. It saved Susan's life. The non-pneumatic anti-shock garment can be the difference between life and death for women living in remote areas who experience postpartum hemorrhage.

[00:01:17.91] NASA originally designed this compression garment for astronauts. And in 2018, UNICEF added it to its portfolio of innovation projects. Today, this technology has translated into an affordable, reusable garment saving the lives of countless mothers around the world. This is the story of innovation.

[00:01:46.34] The acceleration, adaptation, and deployment of technology is essential to helping solve the world's biggest challenges. And UNICEF's Office of Innovation seeks to do just that. It is using its capacity to scale proven technologies to make these life-saving innovations available in locations where they are needed most.

[00:02:08.18] Hi, everyone. I'm Saara Chaudry, your host for the For Every Child Podcast. Today, we will be taking a look at the role innovation plays at UNICEF.

[00:02:20.74] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:02:33.94] UNICEF's Office of Innovation was set up to look into how UNICEF could accelerate results for children, exploring what's next in tech, and what new ideas could accelerate the work to improve the lives of children around the world. In 2014, the Office of Innovation launched the Venture Fund-- a fund investing in open source technology solutions and early stage startups. And since then, multiple cohorts of companies have graduated from it.

[00:03:06.16] We have with us Bo Percival, UNICEF senior advisor for innovation along with Stephanie Sy and Spencer Horne-- both graduates of the Venture Fund. Stephanie is the founder of Thinking Machines-- a data consulting firm that builds AI apps and open data platforms, helping organizations make better decisions. Spencer is the founder and CEO of Cloudline-- a company redefining the limits of aerial operations with autonomous airships.

[00:03:39.56] Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. My first question is for Bo. So you've been with UNICEF's Office of Innovation for quite a while now. Can you explain the impact investing in innovation has for organizations like UNICEF?

[00:03:54.92] So for UNICEF, I think the impact is multiple. I think-- obviously, the end result is impact for children. So how can we deliver services? How can we create a better world? I mean in the context of climate, how can we address some of the issues that we're facing? And I would say that UNICEF has an amazing amount of skills and expertise, but we can't do it all alone.

[00:04:16.52] So making these investments is really important to make sure that we're investing in the ecosystems in which we work, the countries in which we work, and also doing it together, doing it with other companies, doing it with other partners, and looking at how maybe I could say we could amplify the impact that we're having. So yes, we could do some by ourselves. But we can do more when we do it with others.

[00:04:39.69] Thanks, Bo. Stephanie and Spencer, what was your journey like with the Venture Fund?

[00:04:46.25] We were part of UNICEF Innovations Fund 2018 cohort of AI companies. And we really got into this because we wanted to build open source, open data machine learning models for poverty estimation that were local for us in the Philippines.

[00:05:04.10] And at that time, being part of the Venture Fund was a way for us to get paid to do open source work at somebody who cared-- an organization, who cared very much about that same giving people more equity and more access to advanced AI technology who also believed with us that you could build better machine learning models if they were localized for the regions where you were also building solutions for.

[00:05:31.10] We were also very lucky in that UNICEF provided us with mentors who were quite experienced in building and deploying open source technology to help us make sure that, yeah, we built the tech. We found how to make impact. And we also developed a community around it. And we're building it towards the best of open source standards.

[00:05:53.21] We were first connected to UNICEF via the UNICEF Innovation Fund. And they had been a particular program which was looking at funding early staged drone companies or a cohort of drone companies that were doing humanitarian work. And so there was this really natural fit between our existing mission to get out to some of these remote areas with key logistics.

[00:06:21.57] And, of course, that forms a big part of UNICEF's mission as well. If we think about getting medical products and cold chain products, there was a lot of alignment with that. And we were accepted into that cohort and received some funding from the Innovation Fund which was really instrumental because it was some of our earliest funding and really catalyzed other funding activity for us.

[00:06:44.81] One of the biggest advantages of being in the cohort was having access to both the other startups and founders in the cohort, as well as the various UNICEF teams, experts, and folks who are in the different country offices that we could get connected to.

[00:07:02.06] So for one, we had people working on different areas of the problems that you face within the drone sector as a whole. Some folks are creating software for unmanned traffic management. Others were looking specifically at monitoring and data gathering missions. And then, of course, we were focused at the time still primarily on logistics.

[00:07:24.77] And then, also when we looked then at the guidance we could get and the connection we could get to UNICEF country offices, this really helped us with what people might describe as the kind of customer-centered design because it gave us that early access into the challenges that were being faced at the time. And so we could really design for solving those.

[00:07:46.38] In fact, our work with the fund centered quite early on in creating a cold chain container, a payload-carrying container specifically so that we could move cold chain products, medicines, et cetera over really long distances. Where typically with other drone types, you wouldn't have the payload capacity or the excess energy to cool things. You would just sort of pack them up and move them really quickly. Cloudline could then also offer this dedicated cold chain solution which would be game-changing.

[00:08:19.44] All right. So I have to follow up to that. Did you feel that your ideas changed as you went through the process of working with a humanitarian organization like UNICEF?

[00:08:29.91] I think, by far, one of the most insightful exercises for us was actually when we got to the point where we could get out to country office sites where the work was being done. It gets us away from that challenge where engineers are sitting in centers of technology, designing away, and solving for the world that they know and puts us really into the world of the end user.

[00:08:57.59] And I think we learned that lesson very early on about how unique the setup can be in each location and how important it is for us to design for versatility. So we had very early on begun centering on the idea of really getting away from any form of ground infrastructure. And it became key that we could take our aircraft into different areas. And we could then perform a variety of different forms of interaction with end users.

[00:09:33.94] For example, we had an early thesis that if you want to move large consignments, you're going to have to land and take off assuming that you can find an empty patch of land somewhere of about a 20 or 30-meter length scale. This is not particularly large. We assumed you can find this especially if you go out into remote areas.

[00:09:54.40] And I won't forget getting out to one of the clinics out in Namibia which is a country office we're now actually proceeding with some of this work and getting to one of the sites. And I had not been to this part of Namibia in the north of the country. I had imagined sort of relatively sparse sand dunes and wide open spaces. And there were trees everywhere.

[00:10:19.09] And we effectively realized that there would either have to be an exercise at each clinic of trying to clear pieces of land or that we'd actually have to provide some of those users with a winched delivery solution. And so that's something that we could start developing so that we didn't have to land at a location, but we could hover above it. And we could lower whatever we needed to or pick up whatever we needed to with a winch.

[00:10:47.26] And that second point actually just reminds me of another important insight. It was that as we went down that customer journey, we also began to see places where users would be not necessarily what we expected. We'd always thought on the medical goods case, it was about the outbound journey.

[00:11:09.07] But then when we started engaging with the local agencies, with the country offices, with partners of theirs-- in Namibia, for example, that's the Department of Health and the Institute of Pathology. We realized that getting samples back from those remote locations was key because this was the thing that had a really big time dependency. And so that was something that was quite crucial for us just in terms of learning that lesson and being able to incorporate that in design.

[00:11:43.54] So we've evolved significantly from the point when we started with the Venture Fund where the thesis was entirely logistics-based. And what we've realized in part even just the journey we've worked with UNICEF is that there is this tremendous opportunity in having a platform that's already got very high endurance, that's got very high range, that is solar-powered. And so for many different types of users, it brings an emissions-free solution to getting in the air.

[00:12:13.48] And we realized that actually we started getting this inbound demand for potentially doing aerial monitoring work as well. And within the humanitarian space, that looks like solutions where you want to map and survey certain areas for understanding how prone they are to flooding. It looks like disaster response. One of the projects we'll take up with UNICEF and sister agency World Food Program is actually looking at how we can get a data transmission solution up in the wake of natural disasters when telecommunications are knocked out.

[00:12:49.75] And so there have been these incredible insights that have come from just working with customers, understanding where else we can provide tremendous value. And now, we've got a sort of a fuller offering of services that actually touches on far more needs than when we first started the journey.

[00:13:08.50] And so now, we've been working with the UNICEF EAPRO team over the last year and a half to build what we're calling AI4D-- an AI for development web app that contains open data sets, geospatial processing, a lot of geospatial processing tooling and code, and open source poverty models for nine countries across Southeast Asia, and machine learning air quality estimator for Thailand.

[00:13:36.82] And our goal is to 10x-- our goal here is we want a 10x the amount of AI research being done in Southeast Asia for Southeast Asia through this open source, open science, open data work. It's been really fun so far. The next round of work facing us is getting adoption across all the UNICEF country offices and in all the different countries where we're making these machine learning models and handling these data sets to drive adoption and the use of these machine learning estimates for policy making, for infrastructure development.

[00:14:11.93] It's something that would not be possible as a purely private company developing purely private intellectual property. It is so important that UNICEF, through the Innovation Fund committed to us, that this would be a piece of open source work. And we're getting exponential impact and benefit from this as we see other scientists, other civic-- it's becoming a civic standard now to use these open source models and to use these particular geospatial data processing tools.

[00:14:41.92] Because now, people who don't even work for thinking machines maybe email us with a question about data. A bunch of grad students making their PhD or master's theses using these tools, they're now able to interoperate with each other and with us because we're sharing common standards for the data, for the tooling common benchmarks for the machine learning models. And that's going to have ongoing, compounding impact as we go

[00:15:10.21] Bo, we've heard today how open source technology is a big part of the Venture Fund. Can you elaborate on that a little bit more and why it's so important for UNICEF?

[00:15:22.33] Yeah, so I think open source is both a personal and a professional mission for me. I think in the work that we do to create pieces of technology and then to have them protected so heavily that other people and more people and more children particularly can't access them seems somewhat irresponsible if we're to invest in these companies and then say, well, only this very select few are able to access. So for me, open source and free and open source software is a big part of our accessibility and a big part about tech equity.

[00:15:53.80] The best analogy I have is if you think about it in terms of generics when it comes to medications. If we're going to create a piece of technology that could have impact on millions and millions of children's lives to then protect that, which means you can only have that impact if you can afford it, I think is working against UNICEF's mission. So it's almost core to the work that we're doing.

[00:16:13.21] And the other part of it is there's a bit of a saying like public funds for public goods. So if we're working in partnership with governments, being able to have a model such as the stuff that Steph is talking about or even a piece of technology that can be developed in the Philippines and then scaled very quickly like to Thailand, to Malaysia, to Indonesia.

[00:16:32.38] Being able to invest in that technology, the return might not be dollar for dollar. But the return there is in IP like open IP that now can be picked up and used over and over again. So it's a similar point that Steph is making. This is compounding returns. We invest in a piece of technology, it becomes open source. And then, it becomes much more accessible for other people to pick up, for other countries to pick up and other governments to work with.

[00:16:55.89] Thank you all so much. What an insightful discussion. As we heard from our guests, now more than ever, innovation is key in tackling the challenges children are facing today. We must do more faster to achieve the change every child deserves. And in seeking to solve these complex issues for children, it can lead to meaningful, sustainable impact for all.

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