Innovations Against Poverty (IAP)

Innovations Against Poverty is both the name of a department within SIDA (the Swedish development agency – confusingly pronounced the same was as the Canadian Development Agency so our teachers frequently say things like Canadian CIDA when they are talking about projects that might involve both organizations or only the Canadian one) and a competition for students attending university in Sweden run by SIDA in conjunction with some private sector players . Your team (you can compete as an individual but where's the fun in that!) is given a scenario of a challenge in a low or middle income country (LMIC – just so you know we call them that these days – not developing countries) and tasked to come up with a social business solution that will help to address this issue.

Our team chose to look at maternal and child health in Zambia. All of the scenarios and challenges presented in some way corresponded to one or more of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – ours touched on 4 (improve child health) and 5 (improve maternal health). Three of the team members were people I met through TEDx and we worked well together I thought. 

Soe told Karl about the competition basically a week before the submission of the proposal for the project was due and so we worked very hard on our project and were pleasantly surprised (okay, maybe some of us were downright shocked) when we made it into the next round. In the final round only 5 teams would compete for the grand prize which included a trip to Zambia to attend the annual Innovations Against Poverty Conference.

Here we are on the train going to Stockholm in the morning of October 10 for the final all-day competition. Unfortunately we didn't win but it was a great experience and we had actually quite a bit of fun and learned a lot about working as a group with diverse backgrounds, strengths and points of view. 

From left to right - me, Georg Streeter, Soe Thiha, Addy Loca (Karl is somewhere prepping himself to present - he and I presented our case to the judges and the other competitors)