International Red Cross Invites Entries for Enable Makeathon to Help Develop Affordable: Assistive Solutions for Persons with Disabilities

By 121 News

Chandigarh 27^th September:- The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub) are calling for entries for "Enable Makeathon 2.0" to crowd source new, innovative solutions by and with persons with disabilities (PwDs) for challenges faced by them. Applications are invited from PwDs, designers, the scientific and innovation community, manufacturers and entrepreneurs. The deadline for the applications is 30 September 2017. This year, the programme addresses 12 accessibility and employability related challenges faced by persons with hearing or sight impairment or with locomotor disabilities.

A panel of experts will review the entries and 15 teams with the most interesting and innovative ideas will be shortlisted to participate in the co-creation camp where they will interact with PwDs, designers and investors, mentors and domain experts. This year, the Enable Makeathon 2.0 (EM2) co-creation camps will take place simultaneously in: Bengaluru, India hosted by the ICRC and in London, UK hosted by the GDI Hub and University College London. After an intense 15-day co-creation programme, 10 teams and their product prototypes will advance to the next stage of the competition. These product prototypes will undergo further refinement and market and user-testing phase for the next 6 weeks. The grand finale will be held on 6 February 2018, where three winners will receive cash awards of USD 25,000, USD 15,000 and USD 10,000 and further incubation support. Along with the winners, other teams could potentially have their products incubated in India and the UK, depending upon the relevance and market acceptability of the solutions.  

Commenting on the project, Tarun Sarwal, Innovation Advisor at the ICRC said that enable Makeathon is a unique social movement. It brings together a multidisciplinary team of experts with persons with disability to find solutions for the real challenges that they would like to address. The platform allows us to take ideas from their conceptualisation to execution to testing in a fairly short span of time. Just like the first edition of Enable Makeathon, I have no doubt that Enable Makeathon 2.0 will also be a resounding success and deliver effective, inclusive solutions that are much needed in challenging contexts globally."

For more details on the challenges that EM2 is seeking solutions to, please check the following link.

The EM2 movement is an initiative of the ICRC in collaboration with GDI and with the support of several institutions including V-Shesh, Applied Singularity, University College London, Global Shapers Bangalore, Global Humanitarian Lab, Project DEFY, The Association of People with Disability, Innovation Alchemy, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, IKP Eden, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Formulate IP and the Indian Red Cross Society.