In March of 2017, Ycenter was conducting a 1 month long Agriculture entrepreneurship workshop in Kenya, Africa. While our team of facilitators from the USA and India were working with farmers and young entrepreneurs to create tech based solutions for agriculture problems. We got a request for a Design Thinking workshop in South America and another one with a refugee community in the Middle East. They were both exciting projects, but there was one problem. We had already committed to a program in Kenya and India in the next few weeks. So we told the organizers that we may not be able to run these workshops.
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I learnt a lot about Malaria in the process of understanding the complex nature of the public health crisis in Mozambique which could be used in understanding and estimating situations in other Africa countries. After coming back to USA, I launched a 48 hour hackathon event called Impactathon in May 2014 where we invited participants from local universities like Drexel University, University of Pennsylvania, Temple University to create scalable, easily reproducible, cheap, tech solutions to solve some of the issues in African countries. The event was designed for students to use Design Thinking for understanding the complex social problems and using their technical skills to build solutions. The winner of this event would get a partial scholarship to travel to Mozambique in the following year and implement their solution on ground using the help of our sponsors like Microsoft Bizsparks, Twilio and other mentors that we signed up for this event. And we had a winner in the form of 3 Information science senior year students creating an SMS based app that allows people to request a Malaria test from a community health worker at their doorstep. The solution was simple to use, but not as simple to build. It won the first place, because it had the potential to make the highest impact and it was able to tick off all the boxes for designing a truly human centered public health solution.
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