Tag Archives: competition

Announcing the Winners of the Ideas for Action Competition 2015

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First Place: Team Pennsurance
Creating New Microinsurance Products for Remittance Service Providers in India
Members: Ezgi Aytac, Arjun Bhaskar, Keshav Garud, Matthew McPhail, James Zhou

Second Place: Team Oxygen
Innovative PPP Model for Promoting Financial Deepening and Inclusion in the Rice Value Chain in Nigeria
Members: Michael Adeola, Chioma Ukwuagu, Ogomegbunam Anagwu, Henry Ushie, Maureen Orji

Third Place: Team Outcome
Decreasing poverty in the mining communities of the world through the empowerment of communities in the control of mining royalties: an application to the Peruvian case
Members: Alberth Rolando Barreto Fortón, Diana Lucia Chaman Salas, María Eugenia Robles Mengoa, Alexander Matthew Spevack

Runners up:
Team Impact. PH
An initiative to enhance and transform the Philippine nonprofit sector
Members: Carissa Feria and Joan Cybil Yao

Team Backe & DeGagne
Development Impact Bonds: The Power of Participatory Development in Creating Sustainable Market Demand: A Case study of Open Fires and Inefficient Cookstoves
Members: Lena Backe and Matthew DeGagne

Team Rolling Stones
Introducing Internet-Based Funding Mechanisms for World Bank Operations
Members: Joulan Abdul Khalek, Till Cordes, Zhenbo Hou, Tamara Zakharia

Top Eighteen Finalists:
Team Development Daredevils
Members: Aanchal Anand & Colin Sollitt

Team Synergy
Members: Abhimanyu Roy, Sanjula Bhaumik, Alok Kumar, Chinalee Garg, and Rajiv Krishna

Team Shark Tank
Members: Caroline Gezon, Laura Baker, Kate McNabb, Josh Talbot, and Sania Salmon

Team Politicuz
Members: Javier Rodriguez

Team EcoExperiencias
Members: Brenda López Miramontes, Damián Chan K’in Miranda, Héctor Albores León, Héctor Sandoval Vargas

Team Y&R
Members: Yugank Goyal and Ranjan Ghosh

Team Catalyst
Members: Arnav Siddhartha Kapur, Tom Rutter, William John Glennerster, Anand Sharma, and Henrik Sachs

Team HealthLending
Members: Fuming Guo, Finlay Mungall, and Tingting Guo

Team Bottom-Liners
Members: Leslie Ngwae Ngwa and Kingsley Nfor Monde

Team Africa Prosperity
Members: Landry Signé and Matthieu Ostrander

Team Migrants for Development
Members: Victoria Finn and Paul P. Maeser

Team Foster Capital
Members: David Berdugo and Roma Poberejsky

Responses to this Week’s Pre-Competition Question on Aid Delivery

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Thank you for emailing in your responses to “what aid delivery models do you think are poised to make an outsized impact in the next 5 years”! We’d like to share a couple of them with you to help you think about possible topics to address when the competition question is released next month.
 
Feel free to comment on this post or send in additional thoughts to ideasforaction2015@gmail.com
 
Response from Kat Muller, Monitor Deloitte, New York City (USA)
Outcomes-based aid is somewhat of a hot topic right now, but in my opinion, certainly qualifies as innovative and as having the potential to make an outsized impact in the development space. I suppose it’s more about development financing than aid delivery, but I’m going with it.
Outcomes-based aid is essentially any arrangement where payment is dependent on or linked to the delivery of pre-defined outcomes. The approach is also called “cash on delivery” aid or “payment for success;” social impact bonds are a well-known example. Essentially, this approach is structured to offer several benefits: reducing risk for public funders while increasing accountability; providing further investment opportunities to socially-minded investors; allowing service providers to decide how to seek results (as opposed to traditional aid which is often provided with strict programmatic direction from often far-away donors); and providing incentive and funding for preventive interventions to be implemented, whereas public budgets for preventive interventions might be cut in favor of aid directed at already-ailing populations.
The concept is certainly exciting, and excitement around the concept may just be renewed after the recent (Aug 2014) announcement that the first results of the first-ever social impact bond, directed at reducing recidivism in Peterborough Prison in the UK, imply program success (8.5% reduction in recidivism compared to a control group) and a pending positive return for investors.
Like any approach, outcomes-based aid is not without its challenges. It has seen relatively slow pick-up, for a number of reasons: gathering a group of stakeholders interested in the relatively complex arrangement is difficult; agreeing upon and measuring outcomes, not to mention determining causation of outcomes, is difficult; finding investors willing to take on the risk of such arrangements is difficult; and, as implicitly acknowledged by the purpose of the Ideas for Action competition, the people in charge often like to stick to what they know. That said, I’m hopeful that given the well-documented growing interest in impact investing, the work being done by DFIs and foundations to support the aid ecosystem, and the success of the first social impact bond, that the outcomes-based approach will be highly impactful in the coming decade.
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Response from Will Docimo, Deloitte, Washington DC (USA)
An issue facing development is the lack of private investment. One potential would be public/private partnerships funded by the Bank. This venture would allow for private companies to train and employ local talent for local needs. With funds from the Bank, investment risk would be diminished and allow for new technologies to be utilized by within the community. An example of this would be mHealth.

Ideas for Action Kick-Off: we want to hear from YOU!

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Ned Shell, young professionals organizing leader for Ideas for Action (IFA), kicks things off by asking you to comment on what recent innovations in aid delivery models you think are poised to make a big impact in the next 5 years. Email us at ideasforaction2015@gmail.com and we will post online your thoughts and opinions. Your responses can range from a few sentences to a couple of paragraphs. If you’d like credit on our website for your response, make sure to include your name, company/institution, and location in the email.

Every 1-2 weeks we will ask new questions that relate to the topic(s) your competition teams will eventually need to tackle when the question is released. Don’t wait for the competition to get involved – start thinking about the issues now and share them with other IFA participants by emailing us.