Tanzania and Mozambique have taken a novel approach to dealing with two significant challenges: the public health crisis caused by tuberculosis, and the threat to public safety and development posed by landmines and explosive remnants of war. In 2014, there were an estimated 9.6 million NEW Tuberculosis patients and 1.5 Million TB deaths worldwide. Similarly, 110 Million anti-personnel mines are currently in the ground and they kill 15,000 to 20,000 people every year and severely maim countless more. Both the Tanzanian and Mozambican government are working with APOPO, a Belgian non-governmental organization with headquarters in Tanzania, to address these humanitarian problems. APOPO has developed an innovative system deploying trained African giant pouched rats, using their remarkable sense of smell to detect unexploded landmines or tuberculosis, thereby dramatically speeding up the detection process, decreasing cost, and saving lives. For example, APOPO HeroRATs can check 100 patients for TB or search a 200 sqm2 area for mines in 20 minutes compared to 1-4 days for a technician. Also, TB detection rates are at 60-80% compared to 20-60% using conventional methods. Deploying these extraordinary animals helps to curb the spread of a prevalent and highly infectious disease and to reduce the danger posed by landmines and explosive remnants.

Like many emerging economies, Rwanda lacks the road and rail network required for just-in-time delivery of medical and commercial supplies, contributing to lower health and economic outcomes in remoter parts of the country. To provide cheaper, faster, and more reliable transportation of these goods, the government of Rwanda is working with the Swiss-based charitable foundation Redline, developed out of the renowned École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and with the architect lord Norman Foster and his firm Foster + Partners, to establish the world’s first national “droneport” network. The droneports will act as multi-purpose hubs to enable small unmanned aircraft to deliver critical medical supplies up to 10 kilograms over 100 kilometres and larger cargo drones to carry other commercial goods up to 100 kilograms over 200 kilometres to areas which are difficult to access by other means. This will not only save lives but will also help create new jobs by encouraging local participation in the drone economy. To support this effort, the Rwanda Civil Aviation Authority will work together with ministries, the military, and legal experts to produce a national regulatory framework for cargo drones. The ultimate goal is for every small town to have a droneport by 2030.

Governments have a growing need for accurate, targeted, and timely information. While the internet provides an enormous volume of information, filtering the ever-growing pool of data on the internet for useful insight has become almost impossible given the scope and average quality of available information. In order to provide the European Commission with the information it needed, both in terms of insights for internal interaction and decision-making and for early warning of potential large-scale emergencies, the Commission’s Joint Research Centre developed the Europe Media Monitor, a text gathering and analysis engine that provides advanced monitoring and analysis of both traditional and social media. The platform gathers and assesses approximately 250,000 new news articles per day from 7000 online news sites in 60 languages, along with countless social media data points, and analyses this vast body of information for specific content, emerging trends, and early warnings of public emergencies such as new disease epidemics. Originally developed for use by the European Commission, the platform is now used by government officials and organizations around the world, and a web version of the platform made available to the public receives as many as two million hits per day.

The training of surgeons is challenging because it is not possible for surgeons to practice their skills in a realistic setting. Inside, you will find an incredibly lifelike virtual reality simulation of surgery developed with the help of the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Health and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. The simulation will allow close to 1000 medical students and new surgeons from over 25 medical schools and facilities to practice their operating skills in an environment that is completely realistic but poses no risk to live patients. This is just the beginning of a fully immersive virtual health lab.

Building large-scale parks is prohibitively expensive in dense urban environments. At the same time, cities are filled with abandoned or underused sites that provide nothing of value to the inhabitants of the neighbourhoods in which they are located. However, when governments try to redevelop urban spaces without consulting local communities, they often meet resistance from those communities. The Mexico City Public Space Authority (AEP), working with the NGO EMBARQ, developed a process for small-scale, highly local urban beautification driven by community involvement. Community driven “pocket parks”, usually between 100 and 1000 square meters, represent focused redevelopment based around the needs of the community. They are typically previously unused or underutilized location such as abandoned road remnants, vacant lots, or unused street corners, and are renovated to be a pleasant and fun location for the local community. By improving these locations, the AEP hoped to have a dramatic impact on the overall feel of the neighbourhood in a relatively short timeframe and for minimal cost, which on average is around USD 50,000. To date, over 40 community workshops have been held and 30 pocket parks have so far been built around the city, with a goal of approximately 150 to be completed in the future.

Air pollution is a persistent problem for almost all large metropolitan areas in the world, including Mexico City, which has long suffered from very high levels of air pollution, especially from the large number of automobiles in use. Although air quality has improved somewhat since its worst point in the 1980s, 4.5 million cars are registered in the city and the number is growing. The Mexican government has committed $20 billion to improve the country’s health infrastructure, and passive pollution-fighting architectural innovations are part of the solution. To therefore help ameliorate the highly polluted air in Mexico City, the Ministry of Health has installed specially designed façade modules on the Torre de Especialidades of the Hospital General Dr Manuel Gea González. The modules are painted with a pigment containing titanium dioxide, which, when activated by sunlight, reacts with toxic nitrogen oxide and other pollutants in the atmosphere and converts them to harmless nitrates and water. With 2,500-square-meters of façade installed, the structure neutralizes the pollution produced by 1,000 vehicles every day. The façade naturally shades the front of the building, reducing the energy required to cool the building. The modules are also visually interesting and can generate public attention and interest in what would otherwise be an invisible technology.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention needed a way to motivate people to prepare for potential public emergencies. The emergency preparedness materials they placed on their website were comprehensive and easy to follow, but largely ignored because the subject of preparedness is considered dull by many and does not engage the public. In order to stimulate greater interest in emergency preparedness, the Centers for Disease Control created a “Zombie Task Force” to publish materials on zombie preparedness via its blog. By taking a serious approach to teaching people how to prepare for a zombie pandemic, the blog was in fact teaching the public how to prepare for any real emergency, such as a natural disaster, large-scale power outage, disease outbreak, etc. The blog was so popular that within two days of posting, it had received over 60,000 hits and crashed the CDC’s emergency preparedness website. To take advantage of this public interest, the CDC also published a graphic novel, “Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic”. A plot-twist at the end of the novel again drives home the importance of being prepared for any emergency. The former campaign of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was incredibly successful and involved new audiences that were not previously engaged in preparing for potential public disasters.

Due to rapid advancement in consumer technology, China has a growing problem with the vast amount of obsolete electronics that pile up each year as e-waste. In 2014, it produced 6,032 kilotons of waste from discarded electronics. To put it in perspective, at current rates of refrigerator replacement, it would only take 25 years to fill all 6,259 kilometres of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall of China with the refrigerators discarded annually in China. As an important step toward solving this e-waste problem, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and online internet giant Baidu teamed up to form the UNDP-Baidu Big Data Joint Laboratory, which created a government-supported app to make recycling more convenient and efficient for consumers. This app uses image recognition software to identify categories of e-waste using images of the discarded products from users’ smart phones. It then informs users of the value of their waste electronics and connects them with certified recyclers who collect the e-waste and pay the consumers for their obsolete products. Pilot projects have been very successful and in 2015, the number of recycled items through the app exceeded 60,000. This in turn positively changed the way people behaved towards recycling. The programme is being rolled out throughout China with additional e-waste recycling agencies joining the project.

Patients with chronic and/or rare illnesses often lack solutions to help them cope with their diseases and face several unmet clinical needs. In the case of rare diseases, rarity discourages companies and researchers alike from targeting diseases for life saving or quality of life improving medical innovation. Faced with this enduring lack of treatment help, patients and their non-professional caregivers have developed a significant number of solutions to help them cope with their diseases. Without a forum by which to share these innovations, however, the solutions created by patients can help only those who have created them. Patient Innovation was created as a web platform aimed at addressing this twin problem of lack of innovation and lack of diffusion. The platform serves as a network for patients to find others suffering from the same condition, trade information about their experiences, and share and discuss the innovations they have developed themselves, as non-professional caregivers, to treat and manage their own illnesses. Though based in Portugal, the Patient Innovation platform is available in many countries and languages. Over 500 solutions have been published and approved (almost 1 per day) from over 30 countries since launch. The innovations shared by platform participants have helped relieved suffering and lowered medical care costs for countless patients.

To build greater public participation in neighbourhood improvement projects, the Greater London Authority has developed a revolutionary way to plan and fund public capital projects. Working in partnership with the crowdfunding website Spacehive, London’s city government created a platform for local organizations to propose ideas for civic projects or new uses for unused space. The Greater London Authority pledges up to £20,000 to support the best proposals. Local organizations raise match funding from the wider community to unlock public funds and realize their projects. The first round of the programme received 81 proposals, 17 of which were supported, raising 118% match funding from the crowd. In the second round, the Greater London Authority pledged £285,000 to 20 projects, leveraging over £450,000 of additional pledges from more than 2,300 Londoners (including 120 businesses and 6 councils), a 158% increase in funding. Based on the early success of the program, plans are underway to expand the platform to allow for crowdsourcing and crowdfunding more ambitious and complex projects.

Though government visualization open data programs have grown rapidly, they are typically hard to access, difficult to use, and often ignored by those who could benefit from analysis of government data. To overcome this challenge, and working in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab and Datawheel, the Brazilian State of Minas Gerais developed an open data platform called DataViva which was designed from the ground up to be easy to use. The platform provides over 3 terabytes of Brazilian data, and over 500 gigabytes of data on exports, imports, employment, and education for the entire formal sector of the Brazilian economy. Data can be examined and downloaded using a highly intuitive visualization tool that can create over 700 million interactive visualizations, making the tool easy to use for government officials, businesses, and citizens. Since launch, DataViva has seen over 1.5 million page views, with over 200,000 unique users. Of these users, about 37% have been from Brazil, 20% from the U.S. and the rest from all over the world.