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Three United Arab Emirates-based organisations are among the first 29 from around the world to gain funding from the $100 million Expo Live fund.
The organisations receiving grants include Smart Labour (an app teaching local labourers life skills), the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture and a company that will train more doctors in Africa known as Ver2. The three organisations have received more than one million UAE dirhams ($272,100) in funding between them, Expo Live said in a press statement on Monday. Although it did not specify the amounts received by each one, it typically awards grants of at least $100,000 for each initiative.
Expo Live is an initiative that has been developed as part of Dubai’s Expo 2020 programme. It is aimed at funding social enterprises and start-ups that offer products or services geared to improving people’s lives and preserving the planet. Funding is made via a series of Innovation Impact Grants.
Calls for entries for the first grants were announced in January this year, which attracted applications from 575 organisations worldwide. Eventually, 29 awards were made to organisations from 21 different countries. These are the first of a series of funding rounds that will be made twice-yearly in the run-up to Expo 2020.
Smart Labour is a smartphone app that uses voice-enabled content to teach blue collar workers skills in their own language and to provide them with smart services to enhance their lives in the UAE and other Gulf markets. The technology also allows them to report workplace violations.
Abu Muadh, the founder of Dubai-based Smart Labour, said that there are 2.2 million blue collar workers in the UAE and about 16.5 million workers across the Middle East. Although most of them have access to smartphones or tablets, most of them are only using devices to communicate with families or for entertainment purposes.
“In life, they face many challenges due to the lack of and barriers to education. As a result, they are unable to express themselves well, which has a direct effect on their productivity, happiness and overall contribution to the economy.”
His app aims to teach workers important life and language skills which can improve their lot, as well as giving them the chance to receive awards such as food and shopping vouchers, or free phone credits.
The International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA) is a Dubai-based non-profit agricultural research institute which specialises in developing technology for growing plants in more aggressive desert environments. It will use the grant from Expo Live to support the development of inland and coastal modular farms from ‘marginal’ saline water sources including seawater, fish farm water and the brine produced from desalination techniques to help produce food in rural communities.
Ver2 Digital Medicine, meanwhile, has received a grant to develop a medical education model that can be used to train doctors across Africa, where a lack of suitable medical schools has meant there is a shortage of qualified doctors.
Ver2 CEO Brian de Francesca said that “creating more doctors the traditional way takes a very, very long time”. It is looking to develop a system that will set up “locally-based, ‘train the trainer’ programmes” to facilitate the spread of medical education.
“Africa can and will leapfrog other countries when it comes to medical education, because they must,” Mr de Francesca said.
Initiatives from other countries that received grants include a Swedish company, Ignitia, that helps farmers in tropical West Africa to more accurately forecast weather conditions to improve crop yields, and a Nigerian initiative aimed at providing vocational training to unemployed young people, in a bid to reduce massive unemployment levels of between 40-85 percent. The initiative, known as WAVE, has already trained 1,200 young people and found entry-level jobs for 60 percent of them.
Yousef Caires, the vice-president of Expo Live, said the organisations that have received funding are "real change-makers addressing our world’s most pressing challenges”.
“They are visionaries who are determined to see their projects bring meaningful change to those that need it,” he added.
© Zawya 2017
