Collabor8 in WB contest finals
By Nina Mukherji

Passionate about creating a better world and applying technology to solve many of the global social and poverty challenges led 3 enterprising young women and software engineers to enter the World Bank sponsored Apps for Development Competition.  They had a great idea and not surprisingly their submission Collabor8, related to maternal and child health, made it to the finals.

TG caught up with one of the team members, Mitali Bhojwani, to know more about Collobor8 and the team behind it. 

Techgoss (TG): Tell us a bit about the World Bank (WB) contest.
Mitali Bhojwani (MB): This Competition challenges participants to develop software applications related to one or more of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). MDGs are global action plans to achieve 8 anti-poverty goals by 2015, the target date. The proposed application must use one or more of the World Bank Data datasets. Applications submitted to the Competition should address at least one of the following objectives:

1) Raise awareness of at least one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or
2) Contribute to progress toward meeting one of the MDGs by 2015.

TG: What inspired you to participate in this contest?
MB: We’ve been studying the MDGs and their impact on developing countries for more than a year now. The competition gave us a platform to identify the area of progress that we wanted to contribute to and make an attempt to reach these goals in India.

TG: Tell us about your tool?
MB: Our tool Collabor8 is primarily aimed at meeting MDGs related to maternal and child health: MDG 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, MDG 4: Reduce child mortality and MDG 5: Improve maternal health. Targets that India needs to achieve for child health and nutrition haven’t progressed much in the last 10 years.  Our offline tool uses World Bank statistics to show a comparison in improvement and performance of 15 developing countries including India, China and Pakistan.  Our online tool assists in measuring a child’s growth, age 0-5 years according to World Health Organization recommended parameters. Stunting (lower height-for-age) and wasting (lower weight-for-age) have been recognized as two important factors that need to be recognized early.   Our SMS tool will help in notifying parents about their child’s growth during the most critical period of their lives - age 0-5 yrs.   This early intervention will hopefully increase awareness in parents about their child’s required nourishment, breastfeeding practices, care and vaccinations.

TG: What do you do currently? What do the other 2 members of the team do?
MB: All three of us are engineers but we bring different types of skills to the team. Rima and I live in Washington, DC and Prerna lives in Bangalore, India. Rima is an Associate Developer at MicroStrategy. Prerna works as a Software Developer at GE, Bangalore and I work as a Consultant at Euroconsult here in the US.  Besides our full-time jobs, we spend the rest of our time working on our tool design and development. 

TG: How did the three of you get together for this?
MB: Rima, Prerna and I share a passion to apply technology and bridge the digital gap in India. When we found out about this competition, we were keen to use the platform to apply the research we had done in the past year.  I have been thinking about starting my own social entrepreneurial venture for the last 3-4 years and have been very lucky to find Prerna and Rima who share similar interests and passions.  We want to leverage the platform given by this competition to reach corners of the world that we couldn’t have reached otherwise.  In Robert Frost’s words ‘the woods are lovely, dark and deep; But, I have promises to keep; And miles to go before I sleep; And, miles to go before I sleep’.

(Photo: Rima and Mitali)