Technology for Good

GOLD

Hubbub & Ellipsis Earth: Tidy Roadsides: Using AI to more effectively tackle roadside litter

The UK spends £1 billion every year on cleaning up litter. Roadside litter is especially tough to clear and damaging: packaging harms wildlife and plastic fragments get into waterways, eventually joining the 80% of all ocean plastics coming from land.

Tidy Roadsides set out to navigate a better way to drive down litter. We partnered with Ellipsis Earth, who use AI and image-capturing technology to conduct surveys in Glasgow and around Cardiff. The surveys covered 9,800,000 sqm, identified 192,436 items and revealed detailed insights into litter distribution, type, material, weight, and volume. We found roadside litter mostly concentrated at slow-speed locations like junctions.

So, we targeted the litter hotspots with behaviour change interventions, making it easier for road users to bin rubbish and more people willing to do so. A second litter mapping showed that data-driven interventions are four to five times more effective in reducing litter than untargeted interventions. The combination of bins and signs boosted the performance of each by 25%.

We summarised our learnings into four principles to help tackle litter more effectively and efficiently. These insights help inform the roadside litter approaches of local authorities, businesses and highway authorities, leaving a strong legacy.

SILVER

UNICEF: Bebbo parenting app: Delivering parenting support at scale

Bebbo is a self-paced, digital parenting support programme by UNICEF. It is packaged in the form of a mobile parenting app and seeks to inform and help parents support their child’s development from birth to the first day of school with high-quality evidence-based information and numerous interactive tools. Bebbo grows with the child, providing age-appropriate information and activities that align with their developmental milestones. The app is implemented jointly with governments and integrated and promoted through key health and education services. By December 2023, UNICEF’s Bebbo parenting app had been downloaded over 1.1 million times in Southern Europe and Central Asia, with 100,000 to 300,000 monthly active users.
A global review revealed that nearly three-quarters of countries lack comprehensive parental support systems that reach all parents. Recognized as a global Digital Public Good, with open-source technology, local language support, and a strong focus on privacy, Bebbo delivers personalized support to parents free of charge, online and offline.
Feedback from over 20,000 Bebbo users showed significant improvements in knowledge and parenting skills after using the app. Most respondents gained new insights into child development phases and found the app helpful for tracking their child’s developmental milestones.

SILVER

Sano Genetics: Genetics of Long Covid (GOLD) study

In a bid to advance research and explore how an individual’s reaction to the Covid-19 virus might be affected by their genes, Sano Genetics launched its Genetics of Long Covid (GOLD) study in August 2021. It built a robust dataset of genetic information from a diverse group of people impacted by Long Covid, recruiting UK adults with symptoms and inviting them to anonymously share their DNA data with a world-wide consortium of Covid-19 researchers. The programme – led by Sano Genetics, and supported by Government funding body Innovate UK – aimed to aid the development of treatments and the identification of vulnerable groups.

The study drew ~3,750 participants and results are now freely available to researchers around the world. The data has helped techbio company PrecisionLife to identify 73 genes associated with Long Covid, including 42 genes with the potential for novel drug discovery approaches. These were the first detailed genetic insights into the condition and its commonalities with diseases like myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and chronic fatigue syndrome, and they have paved the way for new precision diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.

BRONZE

Aga Khan Foundation: SkootEco: The Learning Hub: Opening the Doors of Opportunity to Everyone

The Learning Hub is a public good that opens the doors of opportunity to everyone.

As an online learning platform, The Learning Hub offers hundreds of high-quality localised learning resources, including video-based and blended learning courses, for free to anyone, at any time – in 29 different languages.

All learning resources are based on the Aga Khan Foundation practitioners’ and its countless partners’ expertise in the areas of Agriculture and Food Security, Civil Society Strengthening, Climate Resilience, Early Childhood Development, Education, Health and Nutrition, and Work and Enterprise.

Content is made available offline to ensure connectivity is not a barrier to learning. Our content development model is cost-effective: to give one example, the production of 12 instructional videos in seven languages titled “12 Tips for Families to Help Children Learn and Develop during A Pandemic” was completed in under two weeks for less than 2,000 euros.

Launched in 2022 (and hitting 1 million views in 2023), The Learning Hub is a transformative technology for the global good. Whether training Village Council Leaders in India to serve their communities more inclusively or supporting Diversity Charters across hundreds of European organisations, The Learning Hub opens the doors of opportunity to everyone.

ONE TO WATCH

SKOOT ECO Group: SkootEco: Your sustainability partner for climate positive action

SkootEco has undergone a transformative pivot, evolving from a green carpooling app to a comprehensive sustainability SAAS platform in 2023. Focused on the hospitality and leisure sector, we address the urgent need for sustainability initiatives among suppliers, venues, and consumers. Considering that food production alone accounts for over a quarter (26 percent) of global greenhouse gas emissions (OurWorldinData.org, 2024), SkootEco choose to concentrate primarily on this sector. Research indicates that food-related emissions could escalate almost 40 percent by 2050, potentially reaching 30 GtCO₂e (Statista, 2024).

Our platform offers a range of impactful products, including a scope 3 Carbon Calculator for rapid carbon footprint assessment, menu and event carbon calculator, an Impact Dashboard for real-time purchase, and a Live Public Profile for showcasing sustainability efforts together with API integrations for enabling software and online businesses to implement sustainability initiatives in their consumer facing products. Our achievements to date include: over 1.4 million trees planted globally, 120,000 ocean-bound plastic bottles removed, and 60,000 tonnes of CO2 countered. With our clients’ commitment, we’re poised to counteract another 150,000 tonnes by 2026 through partnering with innovative project developers to transition woodburners to biogas stoves in rural and less privileged parts of India and Kenya.