Wezesha

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

A digital platform that enhances two-way communication in the healthcare sector between patients, service providers, and government institutions.

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

Wezesha is a digital communication platform for the primary healthcare sector, which uses accessible technology to enhance two-way communication between patients, service providers and government institutions. As a patient arrives at the clinic they are prompted to register on Wezesha through their mobile phone using USSD technology. After receiving services at the clinic, the patient will be prompted by Wezesha to respond to <5 questions relating to their experience. For example, a patient seeking antenatal care may be asked to rate the quality of the service provided by responding to specific questions about their interaction with the care provider.

Wezesha aggregates this digital data over time and across geographic areas to analyse how patient experience differs. Data is shared with partners in government and service providers, who can then make decisions on how to adjust service provision. This becomes a major lever for improving service quality and patient experience. Once this digital communication channel is established between Wezesha and patients, government and service providers can use this as an outbound channel to directly reach patients. For example, a patient with a chronic condition who needs to return to the facility regularly, can receive a digital prompt via SMS.

This solution is based on evidence provided from research which indicates that improving data, communication and strengthening systems of accountability within primary healthcare leads to enhanced citizen experience and healthcare outcomes. 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• Partner with 3-5 primary healthcare facilities in the first three months

• 1,000 citizen engagements in the first three months

• Operate within 100 primary healthcare facilities by end of year 2

• 500,000 citizen engagements by end of year 2

• Expand into two additional countries and/or sectors by end of year 5

FOUNDING TEAM

Simon DeBere - Co-founder

Robert Smith - Co-founder

#TRANSPARENTIVAL

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; COLOMBIA

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

Existing government petition system to fight corruption.

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

 

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

#Transparentival will be a cooperative campaign to educate, motivate and support people to fight corruption in Colombia.

In this project we will use the right to petition as a tool to fight corruption. The right to petition allows people to access public information, challenge abuses of power and report negligence from authorities.

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• Send 1,000 corruption reports using right to petition during pilot

• Reach 10,000 people with information on government petitions during pilot

• Raise an additional $15,000 during pilot

• Reach 50,000 people with information on government petitions by end of Y1

• Reach 100,000 people with information on government petitions by end of Y2

FOUNDING TEAM

Margarita Méndez Sandoval - Director

Luke Hammett - Project Leader

Civis

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; INDIA

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

A mobile platform that enables citizens to understand legislation and share their feedback on laws and policy decisions in local languages while providing an avenue for the government to understand citizens’ priorities and gather feedback on policies in real time.

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

At Civis we are building a scalable, multi sided platform, to ensure that the process of public consultations can be effectively used by citizens and governments alike, to co-create laws together. We do this by:

1. Aggregating all open Consultations seeking feedback.

2. Simplifying them in accessible language.

3. Reaching out to individuals and gathering inputs on these laws.

4. Analysing and sharing citizen’s feedback with the Government - thereby building Government capacity to run effective Consultations, and gather actionable insights.

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• 10,000 users by the end of pilot phase

• 100,000 users by the end of year 1

• 1,000,000 users by the end of year 2
  
  

FOUNDING TEAM

Antaraa Vasudev - Founder

Raise Your Text

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; FEDERATED STATES OF MICRONESIA

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

Texting accountability and outreach platform. 

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

 

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

Raise Your Text plans to reduce teacher absenteeism for unauthorized absences while increasing educational data and teacher-parent engagement through an anonymous texting accountability and outreach platform. Using "dumb" and smart cell phones which are being increasingly used in the developing world, parents and students indicate teacher absenteeism anonymously by sending text messages to the Raise Your Text system, and teachers can engage with students and their families about classroom updates, events, and issues via message. Once information has been gathered and analyzed, data will be utilized by the Department of Education in partnership with Raise Your Text to either incentivize or take action against poor performing teachers. 

Raise Your Text has key connections with the local Department of Education, teachers, politicians to conduct a pilot with 20 schools and 100 teachers on the island of Pohnpei. After the pilot is complete, the service will be converted into a more formal software and service which will be marketed to local, state, and country departments of education with large problems in teacher absenteeism and teacher-parent engagement. 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• Monitor 100 classrooms during the pilot 

• Monitor 2,000 classrooms by the end of year 1 

• Engage 10,000 students and their family members in the platform during the pilot

• Engage 200,000 students and family members in the platform by the end of year 1 

FOUNDING TEAM

Nick Canfield - Team Lead

Richard Clark - Partnership Manager

Joyceleen Panuel - Project Manager 

Prathima Appaji - Legal and Political Analyst  

SEMA

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; UGANDA

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

An SMS chatbot that facilitates citizen feedback about public institutions and public service delivery. 

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

SEMA is a data-driven non-profit enterprise committed to improving service delivery across Uganda's public sector. Our real-time feedback systems empower diverse institutions, including police stations, health centers, and municipalities, to gather actionable insights directly from citizens. Committed to transparency, we rigorously analyze this data to drive evidence-based decision-making and continuous improvement.

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• User feedback experiments run with 2 public institutions during the pilot phase

• SMEA app is created and tested with 15-20 individuals during the pilot phase

• SEMA will be launched with 5 public institutions at the end of the pilot with 1,000 public feedback submissions gathered

• 10,000 public submissions made at the end of 6 months

• Receive 100,000 submissions by the end of year 1

• Expand to two other cities in Uganda by the end of year 1

• Expand to 40 public institutions receiving feedback by the end of year 2

 

FOUNDING TEAM

Nathalie Dijkman - Chief Executive Officer 

Connor Sattely - Chief Technical Officer 

Timothy Kakuru - Community Manager 

Mobilized Construction

CUSTOM CHALLENGE; KENYA

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

A proprietary software platform that enables coordinated, micro-contracted local labor to rehabilitate dirt roads. 

Learn more about the Custom Challenge and why we only fund ideas that focus on distributing proven poverty interventions. 

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

Infrastructure, like roads, have been identified as the largest enabler of economic development. Transportation accounts for 50% of the cost of a product in rural areas. Mobilized Construction has developed a proprietary software to complement existing road repair processes to build ease of use for local project planners. Data-collectors and civil engineers currently document road conditions by hand or use expensive vehicles equipped with sensors.

The second part of Mobilized Construction's platform is the Desktop Road Assessment Management tool for transportation planners and program managers to prioritize and assign repair work to manual laborers. Currently managers decide on road repair priorities based on intuition, community requests, or public pressure. This tool will equip individuals with data to make more equitable and inclusive decisions. The system will formalize informal and unskilled labor as well as create jobs for women and youth. 

The third part of the platform is the Field Supervisor mobile application for supervisors and field laborers to receive micro road repair contracts. After tracking daily progress and completing repairs, data collectors certified complete by measuring road conditions again and wages to laborers are transferred via mobile payments like M-Pesa. 

 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• At the 6 month mark, 30-50 kilometers of road will be repaired

• 30,000 lives will be impacted by the end of 6 months

• 100-150 kilometers of road will be repaired by the end of year 1

• 250,000 lives will be impacted by the end of year 1

FOUNDING TEAM

Kevin Lee - CEO

Gregory Islas - Data Scientist

Jens Egholm - CTO

Pardafas!

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; NEPAL

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

Online accountability tool that aims to fuel the national fight against corruption. 

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

Pardafas will be the counry's biggest effort to-date to map out corruption in order to create and distribute easy-to-use and people friendly, data-driven narrative to wage anti-corruption campaigns.  By going back through the archives of Nepal's top national daily newspapers, we will collect and code the data on federal-level corruption.

In three months, the team will produce a preliminary data on corruption levels in federal institutions and hope to use the data to reach out to at least 70,000 Nepalis. Within a year, they hope to mobilize at least 500,000 Nepalis to further enhance the data. Together with activists and anti-corruption organizations, Pardafas will use the data to unite people in fighting against rampant corruption at the federal level. The team will measure their success by the number of corruption cases filed in court from the campaign and the number of cases won in court. 

 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• Reach 70,000 people during the pilot
• Reach 500,000 people by the end of year 1

 

FOUNDING TEAM

Subhash Ghimire - Founder, Director

Kritikal Lamsal - Head of Research and Public Mobilizer Team

Prem Lamichhane - Head of Technical Team

Angel Sharma - Head of Administrative Team

Alina Ghimire - Memnber of Research Team

Please Disturb the Driver!

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; MEXICO

Please Disturb the Driver! was founded by Miguel Torhton, Mexican citizen and Master in Public Policy graduate from The George Washington University. This new social venture will distribute a low cost intervention in the public transport in Mexico City to reduce the number of road accidents. Following the experiences in other countries, this intervention will encourage passengers to speak up to induce social pressure on the driver. The project aims to reach more than half million passengers per day within three months and hopes to transform public transport culture in Mexico by expanding this initiative to the largest cities in the country.

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

Stickers displayed in public buses encouraging the public to stand up to reckless driving. This will reduce the number of traffic accidents caused by buses. 

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

The intervention distributed by Please Disturb the Driver! (PDD) is based on posting evocative messages throughout the public transport (bus) system in Mexico City to encourage passengers to speak up against different forms of reckless driving. Their mission is to empower as many passengers as possible to speak up to reduce traffic accidents. This social experiment has proved successful in Kenya, where it significantly reduced the number of road accidents in the public transport system. 

During the planning phase of the pilot, PDD will partner with insurance companies, public transport offices, public transport unions, and innovation agencies within the Mexico City Government to distribute the messages. They will craft messages in focus groups to define the most evocative messages for Mexican culture and language. Four visible stickers with the best messaging will be installed within the treatment group of buses (a control group of buses will be used to measure effectiveness of the campaign). Communication with the bus drivers will be face-to-face. Interns working with the project will check on the quality of the stickers at the end of each day with one bus and bus driver winning a prize. After 8 to 12 months, it will be possible for the PDD team to measure the reduction in traffic accidents between the treatment and control bus groups. 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• Have stickers in 1,360 buses by the end of year 1 
• Have stickers in 2,600 buses by the end of year 2 
• Reach 590,000 passengers per day during the pilot phase 

FOUNDING TEAM

Miguel Angel Torhton - Founder and Program Coordinator

Social Cops

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; INDIA

PROVEN INNOVATION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

A platform using vioce, SMS, web and smartphone applications that allow the public to verify the quality and completion of municipal projects carried out by contractors. 

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

Most public services of the government such as garbage collection, traffic light repair, and street light maintenance in many parts of the world are outsourced to third party service providers. While third party contractors send in daily reports regarding the completion of their duties, the government has no way of monitoring the accuracy of these reports. 

Social Cops allows citizens to easily report issues via their mobile phones and the internet. A seamless process (compliant filing can be accomplished in one minute) combined with google map and GPS integration allows Social Cops to identify the relevant authority and forward the complaint to the authority which can view it on a customized dashboard. A council then receives two feeds: one from citizens and one from the third party service provider. The citizen reports are used to verify the accountability of reports submitted and then easily respond and engage with citizens via the platform, notifying them when the complaint is solved. 

 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• Increased garbage collection from 26 percent to 98 percent in one ward of Delhi.

 

FOUNDING TEAM

Prukalpa Sankar

Varun Banka

Harjoben Singh

Vivek Banka

Shreya Sonthalia

Rimay

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; ECUADOR

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

A crowd-sourced platform that allows people to rate government services. 

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption.

 

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

Rimay is a crowd-sourced review platform that allows citizens to rate public services, report irregularities and provide feedback for improvement. It will target all levels of services provided directly by the government or through partnership with private institutions. In order to create buy-in from citizens and authorities, Rimay would first seek to establish its services for local governments headed by mostly progressive, transparent bureaucracies. The pilot will take place at the municipal level in the city of Quito, Ecuador, initially focusing on assessing the improvement of public transportation services as a result of recent changes in policy. As use of the platform grows, the services available for rating and reporting will increase. 

At the end of the second year, Rimay expects to cover all major services availalbe in Quito and have a presence in four more cities in Ecuador. Successful implementation in Ecuador could further scale up the initiative to be replicated in other cities of Latin America and the developing world. 

At its launch, Rimay will conduct a public awareness campaign highlighting the shared responsibility among citizens, municipal authorities, and transportation unions in improving the provision of taxi and bus services using banners and promoters at four main bus stations. Rimay seeks to receive an endorsement from the local municipality to have access to their public information channels and leverage this reach to access large numbers of users of the transportation system. 

 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• Technical platform is developed and tested during first three months 
• Official approval from Quito municipality received during first three months 
• Pilot is implemented in month 4 
• 10,000 visits and 1,000 ratings received by month 6 after the pilot
• 50,000 visits and over 5,000 ratings received by year 2 

 

FOUNDING TEAM

Francisco Mejia - Executive Director

Sauti East Africa

TRANSPARENCY CHALLENGE; UGANDA, KENYA

PROVEN INTERVENTION TO BE DISTRIBUTED

An SMS-based platform for reporting corruption and harassment at East African border crossings. 

Learn more about the Transparency Challenge and how citizen reporting platforms can be used to hold government officials accountable and reduce corruption. 

 

DISTRIBUTION MODEL INNOVATION

Informal cross-border trade is a major feature of African economies: it creates jobs, contributes to food and energy security, and alleviates poverty. Notably, women make up 70-80% of cross border traders and reinvest up to 90% of their income in their families and communities, making the income earned through these activities critical to their household, including the education and health of their children. Yet, small traders are particularly vulnerable to higher levels of harassment from border officials (customs, police, and immigration), including excessive charges, bribe extortion, impounding of goods, difficulties in obtaining passports and visas, sexual harassment, and gender-based violence. They are often unaware of their rights as traders, customs procedures and the required documentation - further exacerbated by an information asymmetry that prevents them from holding corrupt officials to account. 

Sauti means voice in Swahili. It is an sms-based advocacy, prevention, and response tool that uses crowd-sourced data to map incidents of harassment and bribery at border crossings across East Africa. Traders will be able to access a toll-free number that will send out both automated and tailored information on documentation, taxes and tariffs applicable to their products, as well as regular updates on any changes to border procedures. Sauti East Africa intends that all advocacy campaigns that utilize data gathered through the platform to be owned by the beneficiaries and organizations -- including the East African Sub Regional Support initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI) and the network of Cross-Border Trader Associations -- representing them. Rather than engaging directly in advocacy, Sauti East Africa wants to provide these partners with the right tools and data so they can drive these efforts themselves. 

The operational model for Sauti East Africa’s online platform is divided into three sections: Data Reporting which outlines how incidence reports will be collected, Presenting which describes how incidence reports will be aggregated and delivered, and Engaging which describes what services will be made available to users. After being revised following participatory feedback, the platform will be launched with an initial set of training workshops at each of the pilot border crossings. At each border crossing, EASSI will help to identify 50 champion traders who will participate in the training and educate other son how to use the platform. 

 

PILOT AND SCALING GOALS

• 3 borders targeted during the pilot

• 1,500 traders utilizing the SMS system during the pilot 

• 4 national and regional advocacy campaigns implemented using Sauti reports during pilot

• 9 Borders targeted by year 2 

• 5,000 traders utilizing the SMS system by year 2 

• 10,000 people viewing Sauti's data per month by year 2 

• 8 national and regional advocacy campaigns implemented using Sauti reports by year 2 

 

FOUNDING TEAM

Julia Lipowiecka - Manager of partnership and advocacy  

Lance Hadley - Platform designer, web developmer

Diego Hakspiel - Manager of monitoring and evaluation