The Solution

The key to keeping premature and low-birth-weight infants alive and healthy is to keep them in a warm environment with a stable temperature. In developing countries, however, incubators are only available in urban centers and the cost of incubating a baby can be as high as $20,000. The Embrace is an affordable alternative to the high-tech incubator for the vast majority of the world’s population. The Embrace looks like a miniature sleeping bag and is designed to keep a warm and constant temperature in four-hour long periods for babies, thereby improving a baby’s chance of survival during this vulnerable stage of life.

The Origins of the Embrace

Linus Liang, co-founder of Embrace, conceptualized the product while studying at Stanford. He went to Nepal to research neonatal morality. At first, he stayed in urban areas to talk to doctors and nurses. He noticed that the hospital contained a number of high end incubators, which were empty. When he asked the doctor why the incubators had no babies, the doctor replied that the problem was getting people to the hospital. At that moment Linus realized that the real problem was infant mortality rural areas.

In rural Nepal, Linus observed how people struggled desperately to keep their babies warm. Some parents first warmed blankets in the oven and then place the heated blankets on top of their baby. In some cases, parents use light bulbs. However, these methods failed to provide the constant temperature that the babies need to survive.

Upon his return from Nepal, Linus and his team set about designing a solution that would work within the constraints of rural areas – something that didn’t need electricity, was portable, durable, easy to use, and most importantly, inexpensive. They found the answer in old technologymade by MIT: phase change materials that were originally used to incubate vaccines.

How Embrace Works

Phase change material is a substance with a high heat of fusion, which, melting and solidifying at a certain temperature, is capable of storing and releasing large amounts of energy. Heat is absorbed or released when the material changes from solid to liquid and vice versa. The material acts as a latent heat storage device, and is able to maintain heat at a constant temperature over the course of a few hours.

The Embrace is a small sleeping bag that contains a heating unit that warms up when hot water is poured into it. The heating unit then goes into a phase change pouch which gets placed with the infant into the sleeping bag. Because the Embrace maintains a constant temperature for four hours, it provides sufficient time for rural mothers to bring their babies to a hospital incubator. Another great feature is that the Embrace is designed to be reusable.

While there is enormous commercial potential for the Embrace the organization has opted to stay non-profit in order to realize their social missino and give every chance at life.

Eric Corey Freed of Organic Architect On the Future of Green Building from Lorna Li on Vimeo.

Did you know that buildings have more impact on the environment than cars? At West Coast Green, Eric Corey Freed of Organic Architect talks about the future of green building and how it is possible to have a completely nontoxic, organic home.

Eric Corey Freed (ECF): You know… nearly half of carbon emissions come from operation of our buildings. Forty percent of all our energy materials going to our buildings; seventy percent of electricity goes into our buildings, so buildings have the greatest impact more so than even cars. That’s why you’re hearing so much about green building because frankly, we’re to blame for this mess. And for the last thirty years, we’ve been trying to find ways to mitigate that. And the last five years, we really got much better by getting the public aware by listening and understanding opportunities, because remember; green buildings are also smart building and also building to save you money.

Lorna Li (LL): So, what would you say Eric are the hot upcoming trends in the green building industry today?

ECF: Well, everybody gets, you know… very excited about materials, countertops and paints and so forth but we’ve had those for a long time. Really, I think the trends that everybody is gonna start are.. there are several. One is the way we build our building is gonna change dramatically. We built the same way for a hundred and seventy five years, little sticks of wood, sixteen inches on center and it started a change with these new energy efficient pre-fabricated systems and you could see a lot of that at West Coast Green. Secondly, your relationship with energy is gonna change. We’re gonna have a moderate system, a feedback systems in every house. We’re gonna have smart meters instead of dumb meters. So instead of using as much electricity as you need and getting a surprised bill every month, it’s gonna be more of – you’re gonna know the idea they basis, hour-hour basis, what’s the cost of energy and how could you affect your behavior to do that. So let’s say, three o’clock on Thursday, when everybody’s consuming energy, you might be.. get little warning maybe you should dim your lights a little better, defer washing clothes in the evening when power’s cheaper. And those kind of things will really start to go a long way and start getting us out of this rut that we are in of this addiction to oil, and this kind of weird tendency of burning coal to create energy.

LL: Sounds really great! So it was; I hear a lot of things about the high tech innovation around rebuilding and energy reduction. But what about having a home that is completely organic and non-toxic, is that even possible?

ECF: For now, it was possible but you know… we can do it now. I don’t need to wait for an invention. Unlike the car industry, which is trying to figure out some sort of magical hydrogen fuel cell, we don’t have to do that in building industry. If you, if I like to, I could, for you, build you a completely net zero house that produces more energy than it consumes, that cleans its own on water, that grows its own food that’s filled of healthy materials that won’t kill you. What’s sad about it is that the exact opposite is true in most buildings. The energy halls.. they’re full of toxic materials and they just consume vapid amounts of fresh clean drinking water.

LL: So, I think, there’s this one question that I hear a lot and I’m sure lots of people and everyone wants to know. It’s great to go green, but does going green have to cost more money?

ECF: That’s the number one question I got. No! The question’s no. I mean the truth; if you’re looking at the building and the building is at the same boring traditional way, and you try agreeing on it by adding solar power, is of course it’s gonna cost more. But that was the wrong approach. But you step back and rethink green from start and integrate it into the overall design and create something truly integrated. In other words you were to oriented to the sun and take advantage of the breezes. And you understand that light brings with the heat and you can control that, if you’re much smarter about the building and suddenly, it’s cheaper from the outset. You know, except for maybe solar panels and few other things. Green building don’t cost more, they cost less. And more importantly it cost much less to operate. And that’s what the real impact is. And if you think about it, we build our buildings for fifty to a hundred years, so the idea of what you spend for the monthly energy, water, and gas bills. it’s really the best place to start.

LL: Thank you so much for joining us today, Eric. That was Eric Corey Freed of Organic Architect. I’m Lorna Li of Greenmarketing 2.0 here with Steve Morozumi of SF Enthusiast. If you’re interested in learning more about Green Building, go to your local independently owned bookstore and get a copy of Green Building and Remodeling for Dummies. And we’re here at West Coast Green, The Premier Conference for Green Building & Innovation. Thanks a lot and bye for now.

Brought to you by GreenMarketing.tv and SFEnthusiast.com. Special thanks to Organic Architect and West Coast Green.

Spotty access to the Web is what people from poor rural areas have to deal with on a daily basis. Solutions to problems long catalogued on the Web remain out of reach for a vast swath of the rural population in developing countries like India. Fortunately, the Question Box may be their answer.

Question Box is a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide easy access to information where literacy, language and technology barriers exist.   They do this through:

• Free, local language telephone hotlines connected to live operators
• SMS (Text Messaging)
• Mobile and solar technologies that operate off the grid
• Open Question – a simple software to start your own Question Box project

The Question Box service is joint effort by Open Mind and the Grameen Foundation. Open Mind is a nonprofit founded by Rose Shuman, the creator of Question Box, while the Grameen Foundation is well known for microcredit loans to the poor. Open Mind has received financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Question Box launched first in India two years ago, and then Uganda earlier this year.

Dialing for Answers

Here’s how it works – a farmer trying to figure out how to deal with a new pest that is eating away at his freshly planted coffee crop can phone into a Question Box Call Center, where an operator will gather notes, research the Web, and call him back with an answer.

The Question Box – Rose Schuman from Jonathan Marks on Vimeo.

Question Box in Uganda

Question Box also also provides field workers in rural agricultural areas in Uganda. Rather than searching form information themselves, locals can turn to the 40 Question Box workers who have mobile phones. The Question Box workers can then dial into the Question Box call center to ask questions on behalf of the locals or they put the call on speakerphone so the local can directly ask the operator. Once the requirements are clear, the operator will simply look for the requested information in the database to give callers the answer. Question Box’s workers are compensated with mobile phone airtime for their help.

The Ugandan initiative was specifically designed to take advantage of the popularity of mobile phones in Africa. During the last few years, mobile phone usage has tripled and around 300 million Africans have their own cell phone today. Mobile telecommunication now offers once isolated rural communities a lifeline to the modern world, providing access to news, business, and financial services.

Despite all these advances, internet still remains very expensive for majority of Africans. Even if the area has internet infrastructure, internet connection is often extremely slow and vulnerable to power outages. By leveraging mobile networks, Question Box is thus an easily accessible workaround.

Farmers and other rural workers stand to benefit most from Question Box, through the availability of up to date market, agricultural and health information that was otherwise difficult to access. Furthermore, the Question Box database logs information that is vital to specific locales, and also contains government statistics, documents, and research papers that aren’t even available on the internet.

Lack of information is a vital factor that hinders economic development. By   making useful information more accessible to the rural poor, they can then be empowered to solve problems on their own.

David Hopkins from Lorna Li on Vimeo.

At West Coast Green, David Hopkins, co-author of Tactics of Hope, highlights the work of some great social entrepreneurs, and offers suggestions on where social entrepreneurs can find funding. For in depth info on the social entrepreneur movement, read the book Tactics of Hope.

Lorna Li (LL): Hi There, I’m Lorna Li from GreenMarketing2.0 and here with Steve Morozumi on camera from SF enthusiast.com. We are at West Coast Green, The Premier Conference on Green Building & Innovation taking place in San Francisco, today. And I’m here with David Hopkins, who was the co-author of the great book called Tactics of Hope; How Social Entrepreneurs are Changing The World.
So David thanks for joining us today. Let me ask you this. What are two of the most interesting companies that you’ve come across that are actively solving social environmental issues but also turning a profit?

David Hopkins (DH): Oh that’s great. So there are two examples on the book that are particularly significant. One is World of Good. World of Good has recently partnered with eBay to distribute goods that are made, often by women, in developing countries who aren’t paid a fair wage for themselves or for the products that they make. And World of Good brings those products to whole foods and distribution stores in developed countries at a fair price and pays the workers a fair wage. The second one is Brighter Planet. Is new credit card sponsored by Bank of America that everytime that you swipe for your purchases, instead of investing in mileage or shopping spree, they invest in carbon offsets to help solve global warming.

LL: So I remember, number years back. I used to work at a Social Venture Incubator that was called social fusion and what we do was we work with the start non-profit and for-profit enterprises and help them get to the next level. And what are the chronic problems that social entrepreneurs face is finding funding.

DH: Once a social entrepreneur has a business plan and strategy, the social entrepreneurs should go to one of many resources. One is the school, graduate program that can nurture that idea into a real business. And the other is that if you already have a two or three year experiences in growing up business go to Ashoka, the school foundation, Echoing Green, Draper Richards Foundation and many others that are featured in resources section of our book to support and get the funding that they need.

LL: I love your reference to actually going to a graduate program or going to school because you know there’s something great about learning while you’re earning. And there’s no reason why you can’t develop a great company or a product while you’re actually in school. So thanks a lot for joining us today. If you guys are interested in learning more about social entrepreneurship or if you have a social venture concept of your own, I would highly recommend reading “Tactics of Hope” and heading over to the website and connecting with other people that also share your passions. You can go to tacticsofhope.org. Thanks a lot! This is Lorna Li from Green Marketing 2.0 with Steve Morozumi from SFEnthusiast.com at West Coast Green. Bye for now.

Brought to you by GreenMarketing.tv and SFEnthusiast.com. Special thanks to TacticsofHope.org and West Coast Green.