Social Innovation Competition 2008

Quick post about the finalists of this years competition organised by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

The winner of the $50,000 first prize was Husk Power Systems who work with small villages in India to convert rice husks which are an agricultural by-product into a sustainable fuel for electricity generation via a gassification process, and then convert the rice husk ash that’s left over into a cement product for house construction. Ingenious!

First runner up was an initiative called Planting Empowerment which takes carbon offset investments and uses it to lease forested land from small farmers in Panama and pay them to monitor it, in order to provide them with an income that both removes the need to deforest and gives them a stake in their preservation.

Second runner up was an organisation called Swayam who are setting up a peer-to-peer investment scheme to support the university education of students from developing countries in return for a percentage of their post-graduation salaries. This seems like a private-sector version of the British top-up-fees system (as well as looking like an interesting investment opportunity, although the assessment of new students and therefore the accuracy of the information provided about them to investors is dependent on local NGOs who I’d imagine are fairly vulnerable to regulatory capture.)