“We are committed to changing the odds for better outcomes related to promoting health and preventing disease, nationally and globally,” proclaimed Martin Klein, Director, InnovateHealth Yale and Associate Dean for Development and External Affairs, Yale School of Public Health.  The occasion was the inaugural presentations and award for the Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health (“Thorne Prize”).  On its website IHY states that it is the “home for those at Yale interested in creating innovative solutions to health challenges.”  Further the website states, IHY is committed “to training students to become change agents, catalyze interdisciplinary entrepreneurial efforts to address national and global health problems.”  IHY participants intend to achieve their goals of tackling health related problems through using the principles of entrepreneurship and innovation.  They are social entrepreneurs.

J. Gregory Dees, who many consider the father of social entrepreneurship, provides the following definition of social entrepreneurs:  “Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector: adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value); recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission; engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning; acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand; and exhibiting heightened accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.”

Dees says that “social entrepreneurs are one species of the genus entrepreneur.”  A mission focus affects how social entrepreneurs perceive and assess opportunities. Social impact is the gauge of value creation.  Also in the 21st century, demonstrable and measurable outcomes are matrices by which social impact is analyzed.  It is noteworthy that foundations and patrons that support social entrepreneurs are no longer giving social entrepreneurs a free pass on accountability; they are trying to develop and implement objective and definable criteria to evaluate the efficacy of funded projects.  An example is the judges impaneled for the Thorne Prize; they queried each group about how they would use the prize money, as well as how they intended to produce revenue to ensure a sustainable venture.

Working to improve the life outcomes of children born in poor communities is one of the things that social change agents attempt to achieve in their own way.  The presentations stood out in the manner that each of the presenting groups sought to achieve change:  Franchising Clean is focused on providing clean water in impoverished communities in Ecuador through water franchises integrated with community-based owners and operators.  Ongoing support of these local operators is one of the distinguishing factors from the typical NGO approach to dealing with poor water conditions. Also on the water theme, Fluid Screen is developing a hand-held device that detects bacteria in water and blood in as little as 30 minutes, in contrast to the current methods that require days.  The aim is to change the way people test water to detect environmental contamination.  FortiChai intends to improve the health of Indian urban slum-dwellers through nutritionally fortified chai tea, a staple of the urban slum-dweller’s diet. Khushi Baby aims to improve immunization rates by encouraging adherence to immunization schedule.  The child will wear a silicone bracelet with an embedded chip that records immunizations and sends this information simultaneously to a parent’s Android phone and a cloud-based database. This innovation is significant because 1.5 million children die every year from vaccine preventable diseases.

Khushi Baby won the $25, 000 Thorne Prize.  Khushi Baby was conceived as a class project in MENG 491 “Appropriate Technologies for the Developing World.”  This class is co-sponsored by the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.  Thus beyond winning this prestigious award, Khushi Baby validated the pedagogical approach wherein students in MENG 491 were taught how to formulate questions in what one of the professors calls “target rich spaces” to solve the challenge of delivering vaccines along a cold chain in developing counties.  I had attended some of the early ideation sessions of MENG 491; therefore it was an ethnographer’s dream to see the sprout of an idea turn into a bud that will morph into a sustainable and scalable enterprise.

The four members of the Khushi Baby team, Teja Padma (SOM ’14), Ruchit Nagar (YC ’15), Ifedolapo Omiwole (YC ’14) and Leen van Besien (YC ’14) are student exemplars of change agents. They combined their intellectual capital and passion to produce a solution to a global problem that will improve the life chances of thousands of children.