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With an award from the “Saving Brains” program of Grand Challenges Canada, the researchers will use comprehensive data sources to develop comparable national, regional, and global estimates of the effects of major risk factors on childhood development, educational attainment, and the economic impact of those effects.Risk factors to be studied include adverse health and nutrition during pregnancy, childhood infections and nutritional status, along with maternal depression and low education, which may result in inadequate child nurturing and stimulation. In addition to global and country-level analyses, more detailed examination will be done for two focus countries, Pakistan and Tanzania, where project collaborators have close ties and established working relationships.

Experiences in early childhood have long-term effects on children’s development; exposure to a safe, secure and nurturing environment promotes children’s physical and mental health over the long term. Children’s behaviour problems at school are a major concern for Jamaican teachers and corporal punishment is widely used in schools across Jamaica. This project aims to develop and evaluate a training intervention with teachers of 6- and…

New funding from Grand Challenges Canada will enable Sanivation, a social enterprise, to scale-up its sanitation services in Naivasha, Kenya, reaching 2,500 users with its affordable, serviceable toilets.Some 842,000 people in low- and middle-income countries die as a result of inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene each year. Better water, sanitation and hygiene could prevent the deaths of 361,000 children aged under 5 each year. Sanivation improves sanitation by installing modern, hygienic container-based toilets in people’s homes for free and charging a small monthly fee to service them. Instead of dumping the waste, Sanivation safely disposes of it by transforming it into high-performing fuel briquettes.Sanivation’s…

On July 13, 2011 Grand Challenges Canada announced a grant to support further development of a new innovative device to attract and kill mosquitoes that can transmit malaria. Developed by Dr. Fredros Okumu (Ifakara Health Institute, Tanzania), the device is placed outside the home and is the outdoor complement to bed nets and sprays which …

The SubQ Assist is a long-acting form of contraception that was designed to facilitate task-shifting of insertion to community health workers (CHWs), by ensuring safe, accurate administration with minimal training, dramatically changing the availability of implants to under-served women in low- and middle-income countries. This project will conduct a clinical trial to assess the safety …

In a part of the world locked consistently in violent conflict since 1989, and where there is no access to government mental healthcare services, researchers have documented a 30-fold increase in mental disorders. Using cell phones, netbooks and other electronic media, researchers will overcome barriers to mental healthcare access by training lay health workers to deliver and evaluate care in the rural Ganderbal district, with particular focus on psychotic, bipolar and depressive disorders, as well as trauma-related problems. The effort will dovetail into existing systems of medical and religious pastoral care, demonstrating a scalable way to reduce the prevalence of untreated mental disorders. Long-term, researchers hope to address…

…cost-effective options. Working with partners (local governments and refugee camps), the project will implement and operate waste processing factories, which will intake fecal sludge and biomass residues to produce charcoal briquettes that outperform traditional charcoal, saving 88 trees per ton of product sold. Treating waste as a resource provides one of the most cost-effective services for processing fecal sludge. Most importantly, by ensuring that 100% of fecal sludge is safely managed in a community, there is the potential to reduce diarrheal disease by…

The MOMODa Foundation project tests the hypothesis that birth registration of unmarried adolescent girls (aged 14-17), coupled with a phone-based system for reporting of potential child marriage cases, can lower the incidence of female early marriage in rural Bangladesh. To test this hypothesis, the project is introducing a randomized controlled trial in 240 communities in Gaibandha district in northern Bangladesh with the following treatment arms: (i) one…

The Fundacion Lagu Hatavadi Waduheñu, in collaboration with Breegi Scientific, is developing a low-cost and disposable neonatal incubator, designed for one-week usage, which delivers essential necessities for neonatal critical care: heat, humidity, ventilation, phototherapy and containment. The low-cost of this device makes it viable in LMICs, which can lead to an increased ability to treat multiple life-threatening conditions in neonates.

This project addresses Female genital cutting (FGC) in Mogadishu, Somalia. The project seeks to educate, provide information, and sensitize Somali men and women, their children and social networks about female genital cutting and womens’ health. The project will seek to disseminate correct information, encourage dialogue, and to train and network, in the interest of contributing …