"Roshan, Afghanistan's leading total communications provider, and Western Union, a leader in global payment services, have today jointly launched the Western Union Mobile Money Transfer service in Afghanistan that enables Roshan's M-Paisa customers to receive money from abroad. Roshan launched M-Paisa in 2008, and became the first company to bring mobile financial services to the people of Afghanistan.

Now, M-Paisa customers in Afghanistan can receive Western Union Mobile Money Transfer transactions from around the world directly into their mobile wallet accounts from families, in particular from countries with the largest population of Afghans living abroad, like UAE, Germany and Canada.

"Roshan launched M-Paisa using technology from Vodafone, one of the world's leading international mobile communications groups. Today, since the launch of the mobile money service in November 2008, M-Paisa has over 1 million customers enabled to receive their salaries, pay bills, receive and repay microfinance loans, send and receive money and purchase airtime directly from their Roshan phone."

Read the full press release here:

Next month, former Roshan director of corporate social responsibility, Shainoor Khoja, will be speaking at Mercy Corps' Action Center. Join us:

Pioneering Mobile Money in Afghanistan
How do you build a struggling, war-torn economy if money can't change hands? Hear Shainoor Khoja, former director of corporate social responsibility at Roshan, Afghanistan's leading telecommunications firm, talk about how mobile technology moves money and other precious social commodities, like health, education and equal opportunity.

Nearly 70 percent of Afghans survive on less than $2 a day, so it's no surprise very few have bank accounts. But a substantial number—about 17 million—own cell phones. Harnessing Roshan’s technology edge and deep reach into the country’s most remote areas, Khoja and her team have worked to transform basic mobile phone knowledge into financial literacy.

Event: Thursday, June 7, at Mercy Corps in Portland, Oregon. Doors open at 6:30.

In Haiti, one nonprofit may have figured out how to make a pot o' gold out of a port-o-pot.

Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods, or SOIL is dedicated to protecting soil resources, empowering communities, and transforming human waste into a valuable resource in Haiti. Leah Nevada Page, SOIL's development director, has the scoop on poop.

What's the importance of ecological sanitation and how is it perceived in Haiti?

When SOIL first started in Haiti, we provided seminars and trainings on a range of different environmental designs (water treatment, solar energy, etc.) but improved sanitation quickly emerged as the most hotly requested intervention. Our "ecological sanitation"-generated compost has also been well received—our first compost buyers were local community organizations based in the areas using SOIL toilets. People knew they were producing a good thing!

Given the Ecosan training seminars' popularity, are there plans to grow?

Due to high demand, SOIL offers monthly seminars on EcoSan in Port-au-Prince, alternating every month between English and Creole. SOIL is currently working with the Haitian government department of water and sanitation (DINEPA) to organize and host the first ever national EcoSan conference this summer.

From the toilet, to the collector, to the aeration pit, to the farmer, to the crop. How many people does SOIL's ecological sanitation team directly/indirectly impact?

Toilet wastes are picked up regularly by the SOIL Poopmobile and driven to a decentralized SOIL waste treatment site where they are composted for a minimum of six months in a process that adheres to the highest public health safety standards. The resulting compost is then used in SOIL's own demonstration farms or sold to organizations working on agricultural and reforestation programs. SOIL is currently providing sanitation to an estimated 20,000 people and is generating compost at a rate of 5,000 gallons per week.

Have you seen this model elsewhere?

Ecological sanitation is actually surprisingly prevalent in large urban centers in the U.S. Los Angeles and New York, among many others, actually treat some or all of their waste using these techniques and sell the resulting compost to landscaping supply companies. In Los Angeles they've found that this significantly reduces the city's sanitation costs as they don't have to pay to dispose of the waste (instead they are paid for their "wastes"). SOIL's model for Port-au-Prince is not that different from what is already working in large urban centers across the developed world—we just cut out the need for water and large sewer infrastructure, thereby making it affordable, replicable and sustainable.

Check out SOIL's video.

RELATED: Expensive poo: The World Bank tells us how much poor sanitation costs

The next great agricultural innovation might come from years of scientific research in agricultural yields, or it could be something as simple as a $2 bag to protect cowpeas from weevils.

Worldwide, 1.3 billion tons, or one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted post-harvest every year. But researchers spend almost nothing on solving this. A 2009 study by the University of California-Davis found that 95 percent of all agricultural research dollars are spent on production, leaving only five percent for the post-production phase.

Fortunately, some solutions to curb post-harvest losses are surprisingly simple. A bag designed by Purdue University to seal off cowpeas from the weevil parasite sell for $2 and are expected to reach sales of over 1.7 million across Western Africa this year. Before the bags, cowpea farmers lost up to 50 percent of their annual harvest to the infestations. Now, uninfested cowpeas are selling for 20 percent more and increasing annual incomes by $150.

The Purdue cowpea bag is a great innovation for a specific problem. But pests such as weevils are not the only problem. Some farmers prematurely harvest their crops due to an immediate need for food or cash.

A lack of infrastructure hurts developing areas, too. Without refrigeration (both in storage and in transport) or other preservation techniques, many farmers sell the majority of their crops immediately after harvest. For farmers, this means unstable income; for food buyers, it means price hikes of 20 to 30 percent in non-harvest months.

Investment in technology that reduces post-harvest losses might be cheaper and better for the planet than more production research. The World Bank claims "it is likely that promoting food security through post-harvest losses reduction can be more cost effective and environmentally sustainable than a corresponding increase in production, especially in the current era of high food prices. Assuming only a 1 percent reduction in post-harvest losses, annual gains of $40 million are possible, with producers as the key beneficiary."

These problems are not exclusive to the developing world. When one-third of the food is produced and not eaten, one-third of the the water, carbon emissions, fertilizer, labor, production and transportation costs are all used in vain. Decreasing post-harvest losses will vastly increase the effectiveness and sustainability of global agriculture.

RELATED: A simple solution makes a big impact for Ethiopia's farming families

This article is the third in a three-part series exploring the role Mercy Corps played in bringing solar power to rural Uganda.

In our first article, we explored how Mercy Corps conducted a comprehensive market analysis, which painted a picture of strong potential demand for solar lanterns from rural farming families. In the second, we discovered how Mercy Corps connected suppliers to shops and shops to customers by building buzz about solar.

Bringing any new product to market is bound to hit some bumps in the road. While smoothing those bumps to get solar products to rural families in Uganda, Mercy Corps discovered that they had cleared a path for more life-improving products, too.

Let’s talk about the bumps in the road first:

Bump #1: Not all suppliers are created equal
In choosing supply partners, Mercy Corps looked for solar companies that not only offered highly rated products but companies that were also interested in entering the northern Ugandan market and who had the bandwidth and appetite for the risk required to meet the needs of rural customers. A few partners jumped on board. But, even after careful vetting, one company and its products failed to meet quality expectations of early businesses and customers. This company was dropped from participation in Mercy Corps’ project due to its poor performance. “Market spoilage” is a serious risk for new technology and one Mercy Corps worked hard to both overcome and mitigate.

Crowding-in a new and unfamiliar product that doesn’t work as well as advertised, breaks too easily and for which there are no trained technicians, is a fast way to lose most potential customers in a market,” said Kim Beevers, Mercy Corps’ then project manager. “Quality control is an important role for a nonprofit to play in a market facilitation project that necessitates building relationships between suppliers, resellers and buyers.

Another way to dampen seller confidence and to lose customers is to market a great product with an inconsistent and unreliable supply. One of the selected solar company participants offered a higher-quality, multifunctional and lower-cost product that shopkeepers promoted and customers demanded. But, shortly after the project got off the ground, the company mismanaged its inventory, causing a large -- but thankfully temporary -- gap in supply. In the interim, local business partners were forced to turn away customers.

Bump #2: Getting there is half the battle
To boost the supply side of the chain, Mercy Corps hosted a ‘meet and greet’ for rural shop owners to develop personal connections with the urban solar companies and local financial institution branches to find out more about the products and what financing might be available to begin or to grow their businesses to sell solar. Though many shopkeepers expressed interest in selling solar through prior information sharing events, fewer than expected attended the event.

Mercy Corps discovered that the main culprit here was transportation – travel is expensive and takes significantly longer in places where the roads are bad and buses are infrequent. Often, there is no mode of transport at all. Simple solution? To keep these shop owners involved, Mercy Corps took to the phones and even met them in their shops in-person to reiterate the information shared at the networking event and to deliver contact information for solar companies. Then, the Mercy Corps team shared shop owner contact information with each solar company. In their expansion plan, the team will be hosting more meet and greets in more locations closer to shopkeepers in hopes that transport will not be as big of an impediment to connecting interested parties.

Bump #3: Perceptions vs. Reality + Money

Facilitating markets is not necessarily expensive but it is certainly time-consuming and labor-intensive. Building relationships with a foundation of trust and building confidence in a totally new product takes a lot of time and effort. For the Uganda team, one hurdle was overcoming the popular misperception that northern Uganda still requires humanitarian responses to its needs and isn’t ready for market-driven, long-term economic development approaches. They proved this wrong; had Mercy Corps given away solar lanterns rather than facilitated sustained, market-driven access to solar lanterns, the number of products and the duration of availability would have been cut short. Understanding the gap between perception and reality, beginning with a thorough market assessment, is the first step to bridging it.

Introducing solar products to rural, northern Uganda took one person—with support from colleagues—nine months and $19,000, that included conducting the energy poverty survey research, managing the market analysis, identifying and matching up solar companies and local shopkeepers, managing a range of partners, hosting product demos for consumers and handling marketing and communications.

Because much of this upfront work can inform the project’s expansion, piloting solar in new regions will be even more efficient. Mercy Corps Uganda plans to scale their solar project across four districts in the coming months and another three next year. They are looking for new, improved and varied products and services for which this market facilitation model could also be applied.

Solar is just the beginning
Perhaps most significantly, the channels built to get solar products to rural families have paved the way for other important—sometimes life-saving—products.

We asked ourselves, how can we leverage the channels we’ve created to get more supplies to farmers, more useful products to families?” said Beevers. “How can we drop a Wal-Mart into rural, northern Uganda?

Mercy Corps is working to develop a mobile-based catalogue of items that shopkeepers or households can purchase via phone, have shipped to their shops to stock for local consumers to buy or directly to their homes. The team is focusing on pro-poor products that have been proven to make a strong impact in the lives of low-income families. Poor distribution models and mechanisms prevent the market penetration that these kinds of products could--and should-- have. Products include, oral rehydration salts, hand pumps, water filters, adjustable eye glasses, brick presses, fuel efficient stoves, micro-irrigation systems, mechanized tillage and borehole spare parts.

Our model will use innovations in mobile technology to provide a marketing, payment and information management backbone,” said Tim Sparkman, Mercy Corps Uganda Deputy Country Director and Director of Programs. “We want to leverage economies of scale for both companies and consumers.

If solar smoothed the bumps along the road to northern Uganda, the team’s next plan will turn that road into a super-highway of critically needed goods that improve lives.

Baby formula isn’t the only way to reduce mother-to-child HIV transmission. A nipple shield could be cost-effective and healthier.

HIV infects 400,000 children each year, and breastfeeding greatly increases that possibility, according to the Science and Development Network.

If breastfeeding is too risky, is formula the best alternative? The answer might not be what you expect.

Mothers who have sore nipples or latch-on trouble already use nipple shields for breastfeeding. The improved nipple shield JustMilk was introduced at the International Development Design Summit in 2008 and aims to inactivate the HIV virus through a removable insert.

According to the Science and Development Network, “formula feeding is often unsafe, expensive and impractical, especially in developing countries, where formula-fed babies face a higher risk of malnutrition, diarrhea and other infections from water-borne disease.

The JustMilk shield remains in its initial phases and needs to be thoroughly tested. If effective, it could be lifesaving and cost-effective. Check out the video to see how the nipple shield works.

The process to innovate—to come up with something totally new or build upon others' work—and especially to innovate with real social impact, is incredibly challenging. But the process shares some basic similarities across sectors, and the Nonprofit Quarterly shared this infographic depicting the ups and downs:

Most people who have tried to do something new in the social sphere - in other words, social innovators - find that there is a roller coaster ride you must take to accomplish your goal (or not) that produces thrills and spills and moments of deep exhilaration and despair.

Created by David Brown, of Brown Performance Group, with Jon Pratt and Ruth McCambridge. Illustrated by Jim Atherton. Brown specializes in working with nonprofit executives and boards to enhance organizational effectiveness through strategic thinking, business planning, and improved governance.

If someone recommended a movie about super-rats, mobile sewers and electric soccer balls you’d probably think it was something out of science fiction. Actually, it’s something out of social innovation.

The global research firm McKinsey partnered with ViewChange.org to release a documentary based on over 150 video submissions about budding social innovations. The video highlights some of the innovations including a mobile sewer removal tank, rats trained to clear landmines and a soccer ball that stores electricity and doubles as a lamp.

The half-hour documentary interviews some of the leading voices in social innovation who help explain the concept:

The essence of social innovation is finding new ways to solve old problems. - Lynn Taliento, Parker, McKinsey & Company

Design thinking is a way of thinking about problems and a way of bringing in the environment where something is going to be used, the people who are going to use it and the system in which it’s embedded and wrapping all of that up into the production of particular type of ‘thing,’ an object or a product or a service. - David Kilcullen, CEO, Caerus Associates

A lot of people are attracted to this realm because it combines their innate desire to do something good along with the possibility to tie it into something innovative in terms of technology or approach. - Tom Freston, Chairman of the Board, ONE

While it might not be science fiction, social innovation can be just as fascinating.

RELATED CONTENT: The sOccket: A Soccer Ball that Generates Electricity

Across Africa, simple carbon-free technologies and local creative partnerships have the electrical juices flowing, expanding grid access and prosperity.

In countries like Kenya and Tanzania, 80 to 90 percent of the population lacks access to electricity from an established grid, according to Fast Company. Although electric grids exist in most urban areas, connecting to them and paying monthly bills is too expensive for most residents. And in rural areas, access is even rarer.

For the 580 million people without grid access on the continent, that means resorting to kerosene lamps that harm health and the environment for meager amounts of light, and walking long distances for simple tasks like charging mobile phones. And as mobile technology use skyrockets in Africa, it's increasingly recognized as an important anti-poverty tool. Being off the grid not only keeps people in the dark. It also keeps people poor.

But three innovative approaches aim to brighten the future by expanding affordable grid access and harnessing renewable energy sources with minimal carbon emissions.

Turbines from scrap give new meaning to ‘local power.’ A Kenyan company is finding power in scrapyards. While solar energy is abundant in Africa and solar panels are generally cheaper than wind turbines, Kenya-based Access:energy is making wind power work in rural regions. Their trick? Funded by NGOs, donors and consumers, Access:energy teaches locals to build reliable turbines using existing scrap metal and car parts already present in communities.

That means no need to import or transport materials, and it creates design and manufacturing jobs in rural communities. Turbines are built where they are needed, minimizing the cost of tapping into existing electric grids or transporting solar panels over long distances. And replacement parts, when needed, are easily accessible.

For the 30 million Kenyans lacking electricity, Access:energy believes “the easiest way to get that power to residents is to teach them to make it,” according to Fast Company. So the organization is training local technicians to build the Night Heron turbine. One turbine can cheaply power up to 50 rural homes.

With fully local sourcing, Access:energy says it has created “the first commercially-viable zero-import wind turbine,” while creating jobs, reducing waste and increasing off-the-grid energy.

Solar partnership aims to brighten the future of R&D. Despite abundant sunshine on the energy-starved continent, a lack of funding and coordination has slowed African solar research to a crawl. But a new research-oriented network that now includes close to 200 scientists from 22 African and 10 non-African nations hopes to build the connections to turn that around.

ANSOLE (the African Network for Solar Energy) launched following a 2010 conference in Tunisia when scientist Daniel Egbe of Cameroon introduced unacquainted colleagues working on solar energy research in different African countries. "I said, 'let's see if us Africans can sit down and work together'," Egbe told the Science and Development Network. "We realised that we are working in related fields of solar energy, and that's how ANSOLE materialised."

According to Mammo Muchie, founding editor of the African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, “solar power will become the major renewable energy source on the continent only by organised research, training, design and engineering.”

That’s where ANSOLE comes in. “Connecting researchers is key, especially in a field where the continent's scientists have little interaction with those in richer countries, a continent which is expensive and time-consuming to traverse,” according to the Science and Development network. The ANSOLE website now allows scientists to start new collaborations online, join together on funding proposals, and offer webinars at African universities.

"ANSOLE can help the movement of students from one country to the other, from poor countries to rich countries — in this way information will start to circulate between institutions," says Egbe.

‘Netflix for batteries’ delivers power where it’s needed. Sometimes, the cheapest way to get electricity into a home is to carry it. Tanzanian entrepreneur Solomon Faraji of EGG-energy has worked with co-founder Jamie Yeng to develop a low-cost subscription service for small, rechargeable batteries to provide electricity for individual homes and businesses.

"We want to move power in an inexpensive way from the grid and into homes and businesses," Yeng told the BBC. And the subscription service is inexpensive, costing around $80 for the initial installation and $60 for a yearly subscription, compared to between $400 and $800 to be connected to the existing grid. The installation includes wiring a home or business for full power access, and then allows the occupants to buy the subscription for the battery, which connects directly to the newly-wired power system.

EGG, like Netflix, enables customers to exchange a drained battery for a fully charged one at charging and distribution stations as its charge runs out after 3 to 10 days. Then, returned batteries are recharged and re-distributed to other subscribers.

Two of the three existing EGG charging stations are connected to existing grid transmission lines, while the other is solar powered. While the company hopes to increase the number of solar charging stations, using existing transmission networks allows EGG to “bridge that last-mile gap” between the grid and disconnected homes and businesses, according to BBC.

And for a fraction of the cost of traditional grid access, this Netflix-like battery sharing system is helping more people with limited connectivity see the light.

RELATED CONTENT: “How a Malawi teen used junk to put wind to work”
“Lighting a pathway for solar in rural Uganda”

Many places are jumping straight from paper records to mobile information because they are getting cellphone towers before Internet connections or even traditional phone lines.

In 2001, just eight out of 100 people in the developing world had a mobile phone subscription. Now, nearly 80 out of 100 do.

The Toronto Star shared a quick and dirty list of some of the hottest organizations using mobile technology to improve lives in some of the world's toughest places. What great company! Check out the list and visit the groups' websites:

Frontline SMS, Ushahidi, Refugees United, NextDrop, Mercy Corps, M-Pesa, Boom, iCow, CocoaLink, mFarm, NAFIS, Senevote2012, Samadhan, uReport, Learning about Living, TulaSalud, Childcount+, and Txtalert.

New technology that diagnoses HIV in infants has injected new hope into the veins of countless Kenyans.

The techno-wizards at Hewlett-Packard have partnered with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to support students from Kenya’s Strathmore Univeristy, who created database applications that make infant early infant diagnosis (EID) HIV test results available online and in real time. Currently, scarce computers and unpaved roads mean it takes up to 4 months for infants to get HIV test results. Sadly, nearly 70 percent of test results do not even reach rural families.

However, thanks to advances in cloud computing technology and HP’s $1 million investment in IT infrastructure development, diagnoses are now available through online sites and short message services (SMS) without delay, allowing life-saving anti-retroviral treatment to begin immediately.

“For my first two babies, I received their HIV test results 18 weeks after the blood sample had been collected, and this was given during the routine postnatal clinic visits. But for my third born, I received an SMS on my phone five days after the sample collection, asking me to collect the results," said Elizabeth Mwende, a resident of Mutomo village in Kitui.

A lag time of 17 weeks often means the difference between life and death for the 120,000 Kenyan infants exposed to HIV each year. Data indicates that children whose HIV medication is prolonged have less than a 50 percent chance surviving until age two.

Five HP data centers in larger Kenyan cities are being constructed to process the HIV results, with the SMS and web technology concurrently being set up in the rural clinics to receive the home facilities’ results. The project is expected to roll out to 50 facilities across Kenya’s rural landscape this year for trial testing before becoming available to the other 850 health centers currently open. Kenya’s Ministry of Health is also collecting real time analysis of the program. A successful collaboration between private sector and government could provide optimism for other nations looking to benefit from such advances.

“Technology and innovation are key to solving many of the most pressing challenges of our world, none of which are more urgent than a disease which takes the lives of 31 children every minute,” said President Clinton. “I’m pleased HP’s technology and expertise will enable the partnership with CHAI to save the lives of more than 100,000 infants in Kenya each year, and in the process, demonstrate how the private sector can and should operate in the developing world.”

This story was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.

These five women are fighting poverty in a serious way, but they’re not handing out aid. We hope to see them scale up their models this year and make an even bigger impact.

Leila Janah - Leila knows that what poor people really want is a job—steady income that pays for food, school and medicine. But American companies that "outsource" work to poorer countries aren't exactly popular right now. To Leila, the concept of “microwork” isn’t exactly outsourcing, either. She founded Samasource, a social enterprise that takes simple, computer-based tasks from companies like Intuit, Google and LinkedIn and turns them into jobs for poor people in places like Kenya, Haiti and India. These are tasks that would have been done poorly by a machine or not at all. For example, tagging user-generated content would be difficult for a computer, but the job also wouldn’t pay enough for a U.S. employee to make a comparable living. For Haitians who typically make $1 or $2 dollars a day, a job that pays $5 a day can make all the difference in the world (and can buy a lot more in Port-Au-Prince than it can in New York City). Starting the year with a fresh grant from Google, watch Leila and Samasource scale the model this year. You might just see a meaningful way to reduce poverty and people rethinking what "outsourcing" means.

• Follow Leila Janah: @leila_c
• Follow Samasource: @Samasource
• Samasource website
• New York Times Opinionator blog: Outsourcing isn’t (always) evil

Esther Duflo - When you think of a wonky, numbers-obsessed economist, skeptically testing and retesting hypotheses, add a French accent and you’ve got Esther Duflo. When Esther spends hour upon hour with her nose in a stack of data, she’s not doing it to publish her work in a journal that will pick up dust on the shelf. She’s solving global poverty. Esther is a founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an MIT-based think tank that says the only poverty solutions worth continuing are those that work. And we only know what works if we test it. That’s not to say it’s not worth pursuing new, innovative solutions. On the contrary, that’s exactly what we should try when Esther’s team finds evidence that a traditional policy isn’t actually working. 2011 saw the publication of Esther’s enthralling book, Poor Economics, written with her partner in poverty-fighting crime, Abhijit V. Banerjee. We think 2012 is the year the Poverty Action Lab sees some serious action.

• Follow Esther’s team: @pooreconomics
• Poverty Action Lab website
• Check out Esther’s interactive book website

Jacqueline Novogratz - Jacqueline’s organization, Acumen Fund, has been around for a decade, but watch her this year because "slow money" is gaining speed. Where most traditional investors want to bet big with sure-fire wins, Jacqueline’s idea of "patient capital" means returns won’t be quick and they won’t be big, but they’ll transform how we fight poverty. Her group identifies smart entrepreneurs who see the poor as customers who can make choices for themselves rather than as recipients of aid, and invests up to $2.5 million over five to seven years in such projects. For example, Acumen Fund invested a cool million into Global Easy Water Products, a for-profit company that developed an inexpensive, water-saving drip irrigation system sold to poor farmers. The company used the funds to scale up its production and has sold 350,000 systems, creating jobs and significantly increasing farmers’ incomes. If you want to finance something worthwhile and get a big social impact (if a slightly smaller future return), the results of being patient are worth it.

• Follow Jacqueline: @jnovogratz and @acumenfund
• The Acumen Fund’s 10 year anniversary website
• Jacqueline's op-ed in BusinessWeek, The case for patient capital

Gabi Zedlmayer - You may know Hewlett-Packard for its information technology solutions, but soon you may know it for transforming the way companies leverage their expertise to alleviate poverty. It's been called "shared value," the "new capitalism," and "social investment." Gabi calls it her passion. She leads HP's global social innovations team, which combines its most innovative tech know-how with the brightest minds from nonprofit and government sectors to find real solutions to the world's most complex problems. Gabi's team is figuring out ways to bridge the so-called "digital divide" and intersect shareholder and social value. In concrete terms, Gabi's team has been working with small business entrepreneurs from Abujaq, Nigeria, to Tikamgarh, India, and recently figured out a way to instantly diagnose HIV in infants in Kenya. We're betting on Gabi to be this year's driving force in revolutionizing how private companies view people at the bottom of the wealth pyramid as partners in development.

• Follow Gabi's team: @hpglobalcitizen
• Watch Gabi speak at DLD-Women 2011
• HP's Global Social Innovation website

Shainoor Khoja - In a country with 34 ATMs, cash is king. But it's not secure. Shainoor most recently led the social responsibility team at Afghanistan's largest telecommunications company, Roshan, using the group's technology edge to address her country's massive poverty challenges. The company created the world's second mobile money platform (behind Kenya's M-PESA), which has revolutionized financial transparency—for example, police officers are being paid their salaries without fear of cash-related security risks or the books being 'fixed.' Mobile money also boosts women's empowerment—women can now be employed as microloan officers since they don't have to carry cash. In a country known for its lack of transparency and an extremely conservative stance on women's rights, Shainoor's position is unprecedented on many levels.

• Watch Shainoor speak about inspiring peace through social entrepreneurship at Social Venture Network's 2011 Member Gathering
• Roshan's website
• Read about Roshan's innovative telemedicine project, linking rural communities with urban health centers via e-consultation, wireless video conferencing and mobile.

Transporting Haitian mangos to U.S. grocery stores involves a lot of bumps and bruises. This simple packaging innovation keeps the mangos safer so farmers can reap the rewards of their full harvest. (Watch the video)

Devised by Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences students, the team is "creating a low-cost container and components that can be used with existing sacks and crates to minimize bruising in transit, as well as exploring ways to productively use fruit that does get bruised to generate small-scale entrepreneurship."

If this wooden box and a piece of plastic can add significant value to the supply chain, bringing in more cash for Haitian farmers, we'll say "Go Mango!" to that.

RELATED CONTENT: "The lifecycle of a Haitian mango"

What does social innovation and social impact mean to you? Rajesh Amandan, senior vice president of UNICEF Ventures and Private Sector Partnerships, defines the latest buzzwords in this video with Co.Exist from the 2011 Social Innovation Summit.

Reporting in collaboration with Yadira Gutierrez.

More than 800 staff members in 47 countries cast a vote for their favorite innovation. Which is your favorite?

1. WINNER - People's Choice and Grand Jury: Smarter storage
Traditionally, Ethiopian farmers bury grain to keep it safe. Unfortunately, this also leads to rotten or pest-infested harvests. Mercy Corps staff partnered with the local community to design, manufacture and distribute underground grain storage bags which dramatically decreased the amount of lost grain. Farmers took to the idea and local tailors found work sewing the bags to custom sizes. Read more about this simple solution on Mercy Corps' website.

2. RUNNER UP: Make way for light
Companies selling solar products in urban Uganda don’t feel comfortable investing in rural, marginalized districts like Pader, where they suspect sales will be low. To demonstrate to the companies that local residents could and would pay for solar light, which would be a cleaner, safer and more cost-effective alternative to burning kerosene, Mercy Corps quantified the potential market and shared its findings. The team worked with solar companies to find local distribution partners and helped advertise the health benefits of the technology to pump up demand. After four months, 750 units were sold, and companies are now making additional investments on their own.

3. FINALIST: There’s a map for that
In response to landslides and flooding, Mercy Corps’ team in Colombia developed a new technique for accurately identifying households affected by disaster. The team gathered satellite images of communities from Google Map, and asked community members to pinpoint on the map their own houses and neighborhoods that experienced the damage most severely. Equitably-allocated resources reduces the potential for conflict and speeds recovery - two for one!

4. FINALIST: Bridging the gaps
Mercy Corps staff work in more than 40 countries, so how do you bring together the knowledge of so many far-flung people? Live online learning events. The organization’s “Design, Monitoring and Evaluation” group bridged the gaps created by geography, time zones and cultures by convening a virtual Mercy Corps community dedicated to sharing expertise and measuring the impact of our global work. Sustaining a “many-to-many” web of relationships between satellite offices fosters more shared learning and peer support than a typical “one-to-many” relationship stemming from headquarters.

5. FINALIST: Microinsurance for all
Much of Haiti’s economic potential rests on small entrepreneurs, usually poor people who are knocked down time and time again by disasters, illness or any unexpected shock. But small insurance policies are expensive to manage, so most companies won’t go for it. Mercy Corps’ Haiti team partnered with other groups and came up with MiCRO, which now covers 57,000 Haitians in the informal economy with a financial safety net.

ENTRANTS
6. Fruit farmers branch out
Mercy Corps’ team in Afghanistan recognized that fruit farmers could increase their yields by pruning trees, but that the country lacked a market for these services. The team jump-started a sustainable market for pruning services by training pruners and giving vouchers to farmers to pay for initial pruning services.

7. Planning for peace
How do you reduce tensions when local communities are fighting one another over resource scarcity? If you’re the Mercy Corps staff in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, you gather input from all sides of the conflict, agree on a plan for the communal use of natural resources, supplement it with income-increasing programs and work on using scarce water most effectively. And if it’s all a success, you might even turn the process into a mini-documentary for Ethiopian television, which is exactly what the team is doing.

8. Turning on the tap
In the frantic atmosphere directly following the earthquake in Haiti, many nonprofits trucked in water to give to survivors in camps. But as the dramatic effects of the disaster became clearer, Mercy Corps understood that “emergency relief” would become the norm if long-term solutions weren’t created. So Mercy Corps staff circumvented the logistical challenges of trucking in water and instead gave out vouchers so survivors could buy water from local vendors, thereby supporting the local market to continue providing water long after aid organizations have left.

9. Mobile money in Haiti
Instead of distributing paper vouchers to Haitians to buy food after the earthquake, Mercy Corps staff gave out cell phones loaded with USD$50. Haitians used the phones to buy what they needed at the store of their choice with the push of a button.

10. Bringing down the sludge hammer
If you’re fortunate enough to have a latrine in crowded urban slums, you’re probably not fortunate enough to also have the septic tank regularly emptied. City waste removal trucks can’t maneuver through the crowded streets and residents can’t pay the extra fees charged for specialized equipment used by private companies. The Mercy Corps team put their heads together and came up with two new ways to deal with waste: a motorcycle sludge removal cart and a sludge pushcart, both of which can maneuver the crowded streets of Jakarta, moving sludge to a temporary holding spot for waste removal trucks to pick up.

11. Emergency credit
Due to violent conflict, thousands of households in southern Kyrgyzstan lost family members, homes, possessions and businesses. Mercy Corps’ local microcredit institution, “Kompanion,” created an Emergency Credit Committee and a Fund for Rebuilding Communities through micro-Enterprises to assist entrepreneurs in rebuilding their businesses, damaged from the conflict.

12. AltCity
Not enough jobs exist in Lebanon, and at current population growth rates, jobs will be even more coveted in the near future. Add to that a regional deficit in social innovation and social entrepreneurship and you’ve got a tough problem. To address it, Mercy Corps supported the creation of AltCity, or “alternative city,” a hyper-resourced, collaborative, media-friendly physical space that supports a broad range of activities for civil society organizations and social innovators. A citizen journalism group, for example, could learn marketing planning, relationship modeling, graphic design and financial management skills from other groups they may never have met otherwise.

13. A warm welcome
A harsh winter wiped out 20 percent of poor herders' livestock, sending many to seek a new life in provincial centers. As they searched for jobs, they found it difficult to adjust to the urban environment. The Mercy Corps’ Mongolia team partnered with a local psychotherapy association to provide support and vocational skills training for 1,600 participants. Not only did most trainees find full-time work, but some even started their own businesses and employers began to specifically seek out candidates who had gone through the training.

14. Use the stove, save the trees
In Myanmar, a cyclone seriously damaged mangrove forests, which was the main source of fuel for cooking. To avoid further deforestation of an already fragile ecosystem, the Mercy Corps devised a two-step strategy: market fuel efficient stoves and plant new saplings. The stoves are affordable, easy to maintain and reduce the amount of wood people need to cook by about 30 percent.

15. Show me the data
Rather than trying to compare apples to oranges, the Mercy Corps Pakistan team developed a sophisticated online system to manage tons of data from very different projects across the country, while fulfilling multiple donor requests for customized reporting. Not only does this system outdo the traditional notebook and pen by keeping things organized in real-time, viewed from anywhere in the world, it also lets staff upload photos of work-in-progress with GPS locations. Now that’s a cool way to monitor project impact.

16. Goodbye baby blues
It’s one thing to know a problem exists and quite another to have data to back up your claim. It’s known that many women in Tajikistan suffer from post-partum depression, but data is needed to convince health agencies and governments to fund appropriate care. Rather than come at the problem by funding a solution that might not be widely accepted, Mercy Corps took another route. The team developed a survey to get solid numbers of depression rates and shared it with local and national leaders, who are now addressing the issue with greater understanding and more effective treatment.

17. The littlest entrepreneurs
In Tajikistan, Mercy corps partnered with a Dutch organization to create a financial literacy program for youth and these kids are going way beyond just a piggy bank. Not only are youth learning to manage savings through individual and group accounts with local co-op banks and microfinance institutions, they’re also setting up their own social enterprises! They’ve got the passion to improve their communities and invest profits into school outings and school materials, and now they’ve got the skills, too.

18. Just swipe it
The turmoil created by the international financial crises has made cash in Zimbabwe sparse and coveted. The Mercy Corps team in Zimbabwe decided that cash vouchers would be the best way to provide families with the immediate assistance they needed while supporting local stores, but safety risks made the team turn to a swipe card as the distribution method. Beneficiaries received an ATM card to buy what they need securely, saving them time formerly spent waiting in line for vouchers and saving staff time, too.

19. Back on their feet
Farmers don’t begin their day at nine o’clock and end at five, and their business cycle isn’t a neat three-month period, like a microlender would prefer. In Zimbabwe, the Mercy Corps team figured out tweaks to the norm to produce a win-win: Loan periods based on the cycle of a farmer’s crop, rapid cash flow analyses based on typical farming incomes, lending models based on trust instead of physical collateral, and market linkages with commercial buyers. Each piece of the puzzle helps farmers repay loans and banks receive payment.

And the winner of Mercy Corps’ internal innovations competition is...(drumroll, please)... Ethiopia! Despite—or very well perhaps because—of the massive drought that's hit the Horn of Africa, community members and Mercy Corps staff have hit on a solution that's both simple and cheap.

The word “innovation” doesn’t always refer to a flashy, new, life-changing product (but it’s exciting when it does!). Finding creative ways to connect the dots between needs and resources is often less sexy but packs more punch.

That’s part of the reason Mercy Corps (our parent organization) sponsors an internal innovations competition every two years. The competition recognizes that our staff around the world work closely with the populations they serve—employees are often locals themselves—so they’re highly tuned in to the nuances of the needs around them.

Global Envision often covers design competitions with social impact: the Dyson Award, the Social Good Summit, and Core77. The winning products are exciting and thought-provoking, but may never be implemented or successful in the developing world. This competition is different: the staff who come up with the ideas can work with local populations and see in real time how their innovation is working (or not working). This allows for a long, useful refinement process. It’s also the result of that close interaction with the local population. External designs usually aren’t tested at this level until long after they’ve received the ‘cool’ award.

Much of what makes Fortune 500 companies and tech giants successful is their internal support for the so-called ‘creative process.’ Making innovation a part of a company’s culture means a better end product. For nonprofits, the value of internal competitions lies in discovering ways to be more efficient with limited resources and encourages programs from all four corners of the globe to learn from one another. It's quite simple: Organizations that support innovation and collaboration are better at helping people.

So how does the competition work? Mercy Corps teams describe the challenge they tried to solve or the barrier that had to be overcome. They submit a description of their pilot program, new approach, experiment, new practice. Innovations don’t have to be 100 percent successful—the contest asks entrants to include challenges they continue to face. Sometimes learning what doesn’t work is just as powerful as success. But if these solutions can be scaled up or expanded to other countries, Mercy Corps can help even more people lead more productive lives. We'll vote for that.

Enough talk—onto the entries! Read on for the winner, top five finalists and all 19 applause-worthy, creative solutions.