Blum Center Initiatives
Overview of the Initiatives:
The centerpiece of the Blum Center’s poverty alleviation activities is a program of competitive awards to faculty and students designed to encourage action-oriented, innovative and entrepreneurial activities that contribute to the alleviation of global poverty.
The Blum Center’s role is to stimulate, nurture and incubate UC’s innovative technologies, products, approaches, business models and systems. The objective is to identify and shepherd innovations to the point where adoption, scale-up and sustainability will be undertaken by entrepreneurs, NGOs, or other institutional partners. Working with local partners, multidisciplinary teams of faculty and students develop, test and evaluate promising breakthrough innovations that address critical causes of poverty.
The Blum Center has three core themes around which its all of its current intiatives are centered:
- Mobile Services & Technologies: Leveraging wireless platforms for new and improved services for the rural poor.
- Safe Water & Sanitation: Increasing access to safe water by designing and testing low-cost water treatment devices and by improving sanitation practices.
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Energy Efficient Technologies: Providing creative, low cost, energy solutions that also minimize carbon emissions.