ICTworks

Ending extreme poverty is one of the world’s biggest challenges. As we tackle this issue, it is critical to build resilience at all scales—individuals, communities, cities, and ecosystems—because resilience encapsulates the ability to manage change and continue on a sustainable development path.

The dynamic interplay of rapid economic growth, environmental pressures, climate change, population movements, and demographic shifts, coupled with challenges of social inclusion and inequality provide a complex landscape for which risk and resilience are important factors in addressing poverty.

At the same time, the world is currently producing unprecedented amounts of digital data, as well as unprecedented growth in digital connectivity. These trends enable new ways of utilizing digital data to better understand the real-time needs of communities in order to help them increase their collective and individual resilience.

The Harnessing Data for Resilience Recognition Award, offered by USAID and FHI 360 (through its mSTAR project), seeks to identify and highlight promising examples of both existing case studies and promising new approaches that use advances in data and technology to build resilience at the individual, community, national, and/or regional level, with a particular emphasis on applications with deployments in South/Southeast Asia and/or the Pacific. Innovative uses of real-time data, open data, big data, citizen-generated data, and sensor-generated data are all of particular interest.

Apply Now

Applicants can apply now in the following two award categories:

• Early Stage Innovations: Applicants for this category should have at least a minimum viable product or pilot, although may not yet have any substantive impact to share.
• Impact Demonstration: Applicants for this category should have already deployed their solution and be able to share some impact.

Up to five finalists will be selected from each category. Finalists will be invited to present their work at the Harnessing the Data Revolution for Resilience Summit on May 10th and 11th, 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand. The Summit will be attended by USAID staff from across Asia, other donors, NGOs, technology companies, private sector firms, academics, and others.

Finalists will receive a paid trip to Bangkok for one representative, including economy-class flights, up to three nights of lodging, and up to four days of per diem. In addition, the winners will be broadly publicized regionally and globally through press releases and social media posts by USAID and FHI 360.

Applicants can be from individuals, organizations, companies or governments who have developed an approach to using data to improve resilience in Asia. Applications may involve multiple partner organizations.

The deadline to apply is March 15th, 2016 at 11:59am Bangkok time.