Students and faculty from the Art Center College of Design will spend six weeks this fall conducting fieldwork at the UNICEF Innovation Lab in Uganda as part of a new master’s program focused on design for social impact. To prepare for this first
on-the-ground engagement, the students have been studying a variety of subjects and methods. Through the collaboration with the UNICEF team in Uganda, the group will explore what happens when design is informed by local expertise, co-created with local partners, and gets out of the way when appropriate.

The U.S. Fund for UNICEF is partnering with the Global Poverty Project to launch Global Citizen—an enduring online community and movement against extreme poverty with real-world successes. Global Citizen is a web platform that will unite and amplify the calls of the movement to end extreme poverty.
And this September, as world leaders gather in New York for the UN General Assembly, we’re hosting the Global Festival—a massive advocacy, free ticketed concert that will put the movement to end extreme poverty in the headlines. This historic event will bring Neil Young with Crazy Horse, Foo Fighters, The Black Keys, Band of Horses, K’naan and 60,000 change makers together on the Great Lawn in Central Park, where we will raise our voices and urge our leaders and fellow citizens to do more to tackle extreme poverty.

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a discussion with UNICEF Uganda Deputy Representative, May Anyabolu. Anyabolu gave a passionate presentation about Uganda’s history of conflict, the realities of everyday life, and UNICEF’s various programs and initiatives.
Among many other initiatives, UNICEF and partners have created programs to reduce school drop-out rates, reach children in Uganda’s most isolated areas, and establish youth networking organizations. In addition, the installation of ‘Digital Drums’—rugged computers made from locally available oil drums—have served as a way to promote sustainability and make youth friendly content, along with games and reading materials, accessible to young people. Through mTrac, a nationwide SMS-based disease and medicine tracking system, community health workers as well as everyday citizens can text to a hotline to report theft, corruption and shortages.

Over these past few weeks we have been gathering momentum as we continue our work towards the goal to end the deaths of children from preventable causes. One example of the enormous potential we have for saving children’s lives is in the prevention of pneumonia and diarrhea—the two primary killers of children under five. UNICEF recently released a report outlining effective prevention and treatment strategies for both illnesses. Here are some of the strategies UNICEF uses to save lives.

I recently traveled to Kosovo for the inaugural Kosovo Innovation Camp, a UNICEF sponsored, 48-hour intensive retreat that brought together 80 young people to develop six projects, from idea to business plan. The goal of UNICEF’s Innovations Lab Kosovo is threefold: to develop new solutions for some of Kosovo’s problems, empower young people to be a part of the solution, and connect them with community leaders. By these measures, the event was a huge success. Watching these young people in the room, it was easy to imagine the next Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin coming from Kosovo. The participants’ ideas, ability to connect different technological solutions, and energy were contagious, and I found myself wondering how many great ideas we may have missed out on just because there was no access to a mentoring, support, and peer network such as this one.

The annual Social Innovation Summit is a private forum dedicated to exploring solutions for some of the world’s toughest social problems through collaborative efforts and innovative business models. In November Rajesh Anandan and I led an interactive roundtable titled “Scaling Innovation through Partnerships.” We shared UNICEF’s key learning’s from our Technology4Devlopment work and attendees to tell us what they’ve learned about how to scale innovation at the Bottom of the Pyramid.