Bengaluru: In the final phase of its initiative the Enable Makeathon 2.0 (EM2), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), on Thursday announced the names of six teams who will be competing as finallists in their bid to win the competition and secure the opportunity to build and scale their innovations for persons with disabilities (PWDs).
These six finallists have been chosen out of the 16 shortlisted teams, which were participating in the co-creation phase of EM2. These include:
Team For Growth (Bangalore)
Team Torchit (Ahmedabad)
Team Bleetech (Mumbai)
Team Autobots (Vellore)
Team Welava (Delhi)
Team Unicom Solutions (Vellore)
Team For Growth from Bangalore has developed a product which acts as a marketplace connecting persons with disabilities to various jobs/internships using artificial intelligence combined with human curation to help persons with disability elevate their career and independence.
The Enable Makeathon (EM) is a programme initiated by the ICRC and its partners, including the Global Disability Innovation (GDI) Hub, to develop prototypes and affordable solutions for challenges faced by PWDs, particularly those living in rural areas. Teams comprising engineers, scientists, designers, innovators, PWDs, humanitarians, manufacturers, investors and entrepreneurs compete against each other for grants that will allow them to further develop and market their innovations. Each of the contesting teams are developing an innovation that directly responds to one of the 12 Enable Makeathon challenges, including access to education, access to tourism and access to transport.
Speaking about the EM2, Tarun Sarwal, Head of Innovation, ICRC said, “The ICRC has been distributing orthotics and prosthetics to people across 40 countries. However, we believe these challenges can be better addressed by working with those straight out of an environment of physical disability and living in underdeveloped countries without means of inclusion. The finalist teams’ innovations truly highlight how the combination of open-source hardware and the rise of Indian talent in ICTs can infuse new ideas and efforts into the assistive technology movement by actually working with persons with disability.”
The EM2 will culminate on 6 February 2018 where three winners will be selected for an incubator grant and will get a chance to participate in a 1-year incubator programme to further develop and scale their solutions.
