Dear Challenge Slavery community,
EXCITING NEWS! The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and its partners announce today the winners of its Challenge Slavery Tech Contest! We put out a global call in November to college students to develop creative technology solutions to help prevent human trafficking, rescue victims and provide assistance to survivors, and YOU answered.
The winning concepts below represent the most innovative, high impact, and feasible technologies that were submitted. Thank you again to our online community for providing feedback and voting on your favorite submissions.
Check out the list of winners below and links to their proposals!
First place prize of $5,000 Abolishop Abolishop is a prototype browser extension aiming to inform consumers of the impact of their purchases while shopping online. This extension searches through the user’s Amazon shopping cart and assigns a grade to each item based on the brand’s rating in Not For Sale’s database. Not For Sale’s ratings indicate the likelihood and extent to which a production system contributes to or otherwise utilizes slave labor. This extension is available whenever the user is on Amazon’s site. When launched, the extension finds the information for each item in the cart that has a rating in the Not For Sale database. Watch a video of the Abolishop demo here.
Second place prizes of $2,500 It Takes a Network: Reclaiming Cyberspace in the Struggle against TIP The concept is to build a “data ecosystem” for counter-trafficking organizations – a secure online network where they could share human trafficking data with each other. Organizations would be encouraged to report data in a standardized format, making the data useful and easy to translate for all organizations in the network. The network would encourage more collaboration and use of hard data among those working in the counter-trafficking movement. Read the concept paper here.
Shop4Society Web Plugin Unveils Ethics Behind Consumer Purchase Opt... The concept proposes the creation of a tool for browsing on Amazon, which enables users to see retailers’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings alongside traditional Amazon information: the Shop4Society browser plugin. Imagine that a woman searching for a vest pulls up 2 basically identical products on Amazon, from different retailers and with prices varying within a few dollars. She would most likely take either the cheapest or the first option available. However, if she was viewing this information with the Shop4Society plugin, she would see each retailer’s CSR rating next to the price; she would have a whole new dimension to consider for this purchasing decision. When shoppers are shown this information by the plugin, they will be enabled to purchase responsibly without altering their shopping behavior. Watch Shop4Society’s concept video here.
Mxit Freedom Line Mxit is the largest social network on the African continent. It relies heavily on instant messaging to power communication amongst its members. This idea takes advantage of their instant messaging platform to operate an anonymized trafficking “hotline.” Trafficking victims have the opportunity to provide information to those who can intervene in their situations. Mxit already anonymizes their users by displaying user-selected names instead of legal names. The platform would use existing Mxit services in conjunction with an instant messaging bot to provide quick and anonymous opportunities for victims and bystanders to report potential or ongoing trafficking situations. The information provided through this avenue will be made available to governments, anti-trafficking law enforcement, and non-governmental organizations in the relevant area that are able to help. Read the concept paper here.
JOIN OUR TWITTER CHAT TODAY! Have questions about the tech contest winners? Want to know more about technology’s role in human trafficking? Join us for a Twitter Q&A session with Dr. Sarah Mendelson, human trafficking expert and Deputy Assistant Administrator at USAID.
