Scientists Without Borders Nutrition Prize


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About This Challenge
The rate of infant mortality in developing countries remains unacceptably high with an estimated 3.6 million children dying each year in the neonatal period, and 75% of these children dying in the first 7 days of life. A large number of these deaths could be averted by increased penetration of certain evidence-based interventions during critical periods in the childbearing years of a woman´s life. This includes reducing the persistent deficiencies of certain micronutrients in the diets of women of childbearing age. Among micronutrients whose lack or deficiency can profoundly contribute to infant mortality, folic acid (FA, also known as Vitamin B9) is especially crucial since women who habitually consume fortified food products may have improved folate intake in the preconception period, resulting in fewer neural tube defects and infant deaths.

Unlike many developed countries where FA is easily available in ready-to-eat foods (i.e. cereals) and supplements, most developing countries have few, if any, common food-based sources of FA. Yet, the existing literature makes clear that food-based approaches to FA supplementation are far more effective than other approaches in effectively increasing FA intake among women of child-bearing age in vulnerable populations. However, at this point only 51 countries have country-level staple food fortification policies, and the majority of those countries are in the developed world. Currently, there is no generally acceptable and sufficiently effective technology or method for food fortification or supplementation with FA that has been identified that can circumvent this problem and reach women at the household or community level, and that could be deployed and scaled globally and be adapted to a variety of staple foods across different geographic zones.

Recognizing this problem, Scientists Without Borders (SWB) is looking for effective at-home or community-based methods that would allow women to easily, affordably and safely fortify a range of staple foods with FA at the household level -- in a manner that fits in with their lifestyle and routines and that will not require significant behavioral or cultural adaptation.

Scientists Without Borders is offering up $10,000 as a prize for solving this Challenge. At least $5,000 will be paid to the best submission received and additional awards may be made for the next best submissions with no award being smaller than $1,000.

Additionally, where feasible and appropriate, Scientists Without Borders may work with the Solver to further develop the winning solution and to identify means of implementing and scaling the proposed solution to achieve the greatest impact, access, and availability for the target populations.

The deadline for submissions is December 12, 2010
Register today to see further details and to solve this Challenge

Why We Are Doing This

Undernutrition remains one of the world´s most serious and least addressed global health and development problems. The human and economic costs of undernutrition fall hardest on the very poor and on women and children, and undernutrition interacts with other development challenges, such as disease, to cause an estimated 3.5 million preventable maternal and child deaths a year. Yet interventions to prevent undernutrition are relatively low-cost and provide extremely high development returns if implemented. Combating undernutrition is therefore crucial to achieving all of the Millennium Development Goal targets to reduce the dimensions of extreme poverty by 2015. Despite this weight of evidence and consensus, effective treatments and tools to provide crucial interventions have either remained unavailable or have failed to reach the women and children at greatest risk.

In other words, undernutrition is a challenge that urgently requires innovation to go from evolutionary to revolutionary progress. Breakthroughs in science and technology, as well as novel applications of existing solutions and know-how are required. Generating these breakthrough innovations and novel approaches, in turn, requires looking beyond traditional methods and harnessing the insight and expertise of as many diverse and creative problem-solvers as possible. In an increasingly technologically networked and connected world, there is unprecedented opportunity to do this. This is why at Scientists Without Borders we are leveraging our web platform and network to issue this open innovation Challenge in the crucial area of maternal and child health.

To administer and sponsor this Challenge and prize, we teamed up with InnoCentive and PepsiCo. This partnership reflects our mutual commitment to utilizing innovative approaches to identify solutions to vexing development challenges, and to leveraging multi-sector science and technology resources and expertise in order to drive those solutions to impact and scale. In keeping with our commitment to the highest levels of scientific rigor and credibility, and public good and benefit, Scientists Without Borders convened an independent panel of leading nutrition scientists to develop and frame this Challenge and to select the winning submission. Once selected, Scientists Without Borders will make the winning solution openly available and accessible on its platform.

About Scientists Without Borders

Scientists Without Borders is a web-based collaborative community dedicated to generating, sharing, and advancing innovative science and technology-based solutions to the world´s most pressing global development challenges. Through free web platform, we enable our worldwide community of users and our strategic partner network to frame and tackle specific scientific or technological challenges in areas of critical global need. We disseminate these challenges to a wide network of diverse problem-solvers who can collaborate to identify solutions and exchange resources and expertise. We do this in a neutral, credible, and noncommercial way. To see the other challenges and the resources available on our site, join today.

Meet Our Advisory Panel
To develop this Challenge, Scientists Without Borders convened an independent Advisory Panel of three of the world´s leading nutrition science and policy experts and vested them with the authority to identify the appropriate parameters, specific focus area, and criteria for this Challenge. They will also participate in selecting the winning submission. We are privileged to rely on their expertise and honored to have them as partners in this important effort.
Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta Husein Laljee Dewraj Professor and Chairman, Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, Aga Khan University Medical Center, Karachi, Pakistan Dr. Bhutta also holds adjunct professorships in International Health & Family and Community Medicine at the departments of International Health at the Boston University and Tufts University (Boston) respectively. He was designated a Distinguished National Professor of the Government of Pakistan in 2007. He is also the Dean of the faculty of Paediatrics of the College of Physicians & Surgeons, Pakistan and the Chairman of the National Research Ethics Committee of the Government of Pakistan. Dr Bhutta was awarded the inaugural Global Child Health award (2009) by the Program for Global Pediatric Research for outstanding contributions to Global Child Health and Research and has recently been elected an honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics for contributions to international child health. He was the Windermere Lecturer at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health UK (2010). http://www.aku.edu/medicalcollege/faculty/dtlFaculty	Dr. Ricardo Uauy Professor, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, UK Professor Ricardo Uauy was appointed Professor of Public Health Nutrition and took up his part-time post in July 2002 at the end of his 8-year tenure as Director of the Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology (INTA), Chile. His early career was in paediatrics and neonatology, later he studied nutritional biochemistry and metabolism, and international nutrition, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he gained his PhD. From 2006 -10 he is the President of the International Union of Nutrition Sciences. http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/people/uauy.ricardo
Dr. Eileen Kennedy Dean of the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy, Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts An international nutrition policy expert, Eileen Kennedy was named dean of the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts in 2004. Throughout her career, Kennedy has championed nutrition research and its application to policy, from her seven years as a leading voice for nutrition at the US Department of Agriculture ( USDA) to her studies of maternal and child health and nutrition in Africa, Asia, North and Central America http://nutrition.tufts.edu/1174562918741/Nutrition-Page-nl2w_1177941613339.html