70% of the world’s poor are smallholder farmers, and they produce 80% of the global food. However, these farmers are poor and food insecure. By 2050, the world will need to produce at least 50% more food to feed 9 billion people. This dual-pronged problem of poverty and food insecurity is caused by 3 main issues in agricultural value chains: supply chain inefficiencies, financial exclusion, and information asymmetry. Ricult is solving these issues by establishing a multi-sided, mobile e-commerce platform that fills the holes in the agricultural supply chain by providing farmers direct access to financial instruments, input sellers, end buyers, logistics providers, and real-time crop information. As 80% of the smallholder farmers have access to mobile phones, Ricult’s solution is accessible through both low cost feature phones without Internet connections and smartphones.
Mosquitoes Suck! Malarial Hotspots and the Opportunity for LAMP (UC Berkeley)
The eradication of malaria is hampered by the ability of current diagnostic tools to detect very low-density infections in asymptomatic patients. In response to this,