By Tricitynews
Reporter
Chandigarh 27th
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.