GCRF Demonstrate Impact Programme Report 2020

GCRF
Demonstrate
Impact
This report highlights case studies in which
people in developing countries have benefitted
from innovative solutions following support from
UK Research and Innovation.

3
Introduction 4
Discover 10
Case Study: b.e. Design 12
Define 15
Case Study: Aparito 16
Develop 17
Case Study: Fight Back 20
Case Study: Cradle Vital Signs Alert 22
Case Study: AquAffirm™ 24

Deliver 26
Case Study: Digifarm Innovation 28
Learn From Failure 30
Case Study: PlayPumps International 34
Useful Sources of Quantitative Data 38
Contents

Emerging markets around the world
account for well over half1
of the world’s
population and, by 2025, consumption
of £23 trillion annually2
.
5
For the right companies with appropriate, affordable and scalable products or services, the
chance to build a business while delivering social impact is both motivating and exciting.
All it takes is creativity, tenacity, and, we think, a helping hand.
This guide will help.
It is for entrepreneurs, start-ups, researchers and anyone else with strong ideas for
commercial innovations that can help to solve pressing challenges in developing countries.
By describing the process of successfully implementing commercial ideas in developing
countries through case studies, we want to inspire you to apply for funding from the Global
Challenges Research Fund3
(GCRF) Demonstrate Impact competition.
A world
of opportunity
1
https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2018/08/01/should-long-term-investors-own-more-emerging-market-equities/#ed007dc54ee5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/
advisor/2018/08/01/should-long-term-investors-own-more-emerging-market-equities/#ed007dc54ee5
2
https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/business%20functions/strategy%20and%20corporate%20finance/our%20insights/winning%20the%2030%20trillion%20
decathlon%20going%20for%20gold%20in%20emerging%20markets/emc_decathlon.ashx
3
The Global Challenges Research Fund is a £1.5 bn fund to support cutting-edge research addressing problems in developing countries. It is part of the UK’s Official Development
Assistance (ODA) commitment. The Demonstrate Impact competition will distribute money from the GCRF.

6
THE GCRF DEMONSTRATE IMPACT COMPETITION
Governed by Official Development Assistance (ODA) rules, this competition awards funds for innovations that have the potential
to transform lives in developing countries. They must be aligned to one of the following ten UN Sustainable Development Goals:
By awarding funding, we want to support innovative, affordable products and services that:
SDG3
Good health and
well-being
SDG4
Quality
education
SDG6
Clean water
and sanitation
SDG8
Decent work and
economic growth
SDG11
Sustainable cities
and communities
SDG12
Responsible
consumption and
production
SDG13
Climate action
SDG14
Life below water
SDG15
Life on land
SDG16
Peace, justice and
strong institutions
Benefit poor and disadvantaged people in developing countries
Help to create or expand markets
Boost regional or national infrastructures and value chains
Create jobs
Promote gender equality
Are socially inclusive
Adequately weigh the risk of unintended negative consequence

7
Addressing these objectives holds unique risks and challenges
that are difficult to overcome, which is the justification for
making public funds available.
However, this does not mean that your idea cannot lead to
commercial success. Indeed, the public investment aims to
have a multiplier effect by supporting economically sustainable
ideas that can deliver long-term transformational impact.
COMPETITION DETAIL
The GCRF Demonstrate Impact competition is open to UK
businesses as the lead applicant. Their technical partners can
be from any country. The proposed innovation must already
be at a relatively high level of technological readiness.
The competition has two stages.
1. The first is for a feasibility study to assess the
innovation’s market viability in a developing country. We
expect to fund 30 successful applicants, awarding each
a grant of up to £60,000.
2. The second stage is for prototyping the innovation in the
market, and will be open only to businesses that were
successful in the first stage. We anticipate that 15 will go
through, this time with much larger awards of up to
£500,000 each.
The GCRF Demonstrate Impact competition is designed to
de-risk the process and to increase the successful adoption of
innovations. We want to encourage businesses to thoroughly
understand the cultures, attitudes and local context in the
developing country before implementing their ideas. This
includes using human-centred design methods to assess
user behaviours, confirm market demand, identify appropriate
partners, learn and refine the innovation accordingly.
One round of the competition has already happened. It closed
in November 2019. The second will launch on 2 March 2020
and close on 6 May 2020.
WHY USE HUMAN-CENTRED DESIGN?
Whereas a technical feasibility study answers whether you can
implement your idea, a human-centred design (HCD) study
asks whether you should.
An HCD approach provides rich, qualitative insights and
ensures that your innovation considers the myriad social and
cultural norms, habits and behaviours that might stop your
solution from being adopted. The later you discover these, the
harder and more expensive it is to rectify the mismatch.
HCD also allows you to fine-tune your ideas through iterative
prototyping. For example, during the development of
Harambee, a South African youth employment accelerator,
one of their key – and completely unexpected - insights into
how well applicants would do at interview hinged on whether
or not they had eaten beforehand. It turns out that supplying
a piece of fruit or peanut butter sandwich in advance of a job
interview increased success rates by 30%.
HCD is an established methodology championed by
many organisations, including the Design Council. Several
organisations have developed helpful HCD tools, including
IDEO’s Design Kit4
for HCD and Stanford Design School’s
Design Thinking Bootleg5
and the SPRING curriculum6
.
A useful conceptual model is the Design Council’s Double
Diamond, which envisages two phases, each with two
distinct stages.
Applying the Double Diamond model is likely to be highly
iterative as you continue learning, sometimes requiring you
to revisit your design challenges or even to start the process
from scratch. This can be frustrating. However, taking the care
and time to really understand the issues, conditions on the
ground, the customs, norms, and day-to-day concerns of
your users leads to much more robust, workable, and
sustainable solutions.
4
https://www.designkit.org
5
https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/design-thinking-bootleg
6
https://www.springcurriculum.com/

Phase 1
This starts with a process of discovery. This is
the time to put your assumptions aside and dive
deep into understanding the users, customers
and stakeholders that are facing the problem you
are trying to solve. The next stage then allows
you to use these insights gained to define the
problem as a design challenge in a relevant way
that taps into the experience of users.
Phase 2
This is the time to address your key design
challenge and develop a minimum viable
product to test with users and get real world
feedback. After further iteration and refining,
the next step is to deliver a prototype
solution in the market.
8
Source: Design Council Double Diamond Model
D
iscover
D
efine
D
evelop
D
eliver
Connecting the dots and building relationships
between different citizens, stakeholders and partners.
Creating the conditions that allow innovation,
including culture change, skills and mindset.
OUTCOME
DESIGN
PRINCIPLES
1. Be People Centred
2. Communicate (Visually & Inclusively)
3. Collaborate & Co-Create
4. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
METHODS
BANK
Explore, Shape, Build
CHALLENGE
© Desig
Phase 1 Phase 2
The two phases of the Demonstrate Impact competition align with this model of design thinking and enable innovators to
go through this process and refine their solutions to meet real user needs and market demand.

The following section expands on
the typical phases during a human-
centred design process to develop
innovative products and services,
illustrated with case studies.
With the huge variety of possible solutions
out there, it cannot hope to reflect everyone’s
experience. After all, a new drug treatment
has little in common with a new website, for
example.
Nonetheless, the different approaches to
entrepreneurial success share enough in
common to offer most innovators valuable
insights to future success.

While you might be comfortable with the technical side of your
innovation, you might be less familiar with the ‘people’ side of
it. There are several barriers standing in your way.
The first is your assumptions about the need. Even if you have
thoroughly assimilated the country data and found a source of
trustworthy market intelligence, your assumptions and lack of
day-to-day experience on the ground might badly skew your
thinking. Assume nothing.
Second, even if you have spent time in your target country
previously and think you know the realities of life there, you
may not understand all the complex nuances about your
users. It is critical to talk to the people affected by the problem
and observe how they behave and what their problem-specific
experiences are. You must spend time embedded with users
and other stakeholders in their homes or places of work to live
and breathe the problem. It will yield vital learnings.
The trick lies in how you think of these barriers. Treated as
fascinating design puzzles that need fresh ideas or a new
perspective, they become merely an extension to the setbacks
you might encounter trying to get the technology right. Indeed,
combining the social with the technological into a systemic
whole is likely to pay off in many unexpected ways. The HCD
literature is full of stories of where technological interventions
were less than optimal because they failed to take account of
user insights.
For example, Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO, a
global innovation and design firm, tell the story of missed
opportunities during the development of a community water
treatment centre in Hyderabad in India. The project recognised
the dangers to health that consuming water from a borehole
well posed to the local population, and they wanted to
improve the situation.
However, by failing properly to understand the needs of those
who might otherwise have benefitted, the project had less
of an impact than it might have done. As it turned out, the
plastic containers people had to use to carry away the water
were too heavy for many of the users – women. The centre’s
opening hours meant that it closed too soon for working men
to fetch the water. Finally, the minimum quantity of water was
more than many of the locals needed, making the facility
prohibitively expensive when every rupee counted.
As Brown and Wyatt say, “Social challenges require systemic
solutions that are grounded in the client’s or customer’s needs.
This is where many approaches founder, but it is where design
thinking excels.”
Discover
10
Recognising a problem that your
innovation might be able to solve,
the discovery phase allows you
to delve deep into how people
experience that problem.

“Social challenges require systemic
solutions that are grounded in the
client’s or customer’s needs. This is
where many approaches founder, but
it is where design thinking excels.”

Dr Bhavin Engineer, Director of b.e. Design, was involved in the
Nano Membrane Toilet project that secured a large award from
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This project addressed the
hazards of poor sanitation, water stress, and associated health
risks in regions with few toilets and no network sewerage.
While the technical innovation was in treating human waste
on-site without external energy or water, all the end users were
concerned about was the bits that they interacted with – the
flush mechanism and, especially, the cleaning. Luckily, deep-dive
ethnographic research in the target community discovered the
issues early, allowing the development team to adjust the design
based on user feedback.
When starting out, Bhavin Engineer says that it pays to identify
and map out all your stakeholders – manufacturers, investors,
resellers, logistics, delivery partners, service and maintenance,
system integrators, local authorities, etc. early. He recommends
searching the internet and social media, and consulting NGOs,
representative bodies, family and friends for contacts to find
appropriate partners for successful HCD.
“In this day and age,” he says, “there is no excuse not to
engage early with end users and other stakeholders.” He warns,
though, that HCD is a marathon, not a sprint, requiring many
iterations and the humility to fail fast, fail often, and learn.
https://www.bedesign.consulting
“There is no excuse not to
engage early with end users
and other stakeholders.”
b.e. Design
CASE
STUDY
12
1

There’s no doubt that making sense of the abundance of
relevant and sometimes conflicting feedback signals is far from
straightforward. Rarely linear and logical, it takes continuous
iteration to unearth the telling nuggets to come up with a brief
that, in combination with your technical knowledge, could lead
to a feasible proposition.
A recognised way through is to define design challenges, often
by asking ‘how might we’ questions that frame a problem as
an opportunity. For example, ‘How might we create a sense
of safety in public toilets in India?’ This focuses creativity
and innovation around the user experience. It is important to
generate as many such questions or design challenges as
possible to encourage ‘divergent thinking’.
Another factor likely to positively influence the success of this
phase is to have a diverse development team. Mono-cultural
inputs from people who are all of the same age, gender,
religion, sexuality, race and personality types stifle successful
innovation for the simple reason that the target stakeholders
and end-users will be a richly varied group.
Define
15
During this stage you start to
synthesize all the feedback gathered
through on the ground research,
user observations, surveys, and
focus group conversations into
actionable insights.
“A well-constructed brief
allows for serendipity,
unpredictability, and the
capricious whims of fate...”
That said, since your idea is likely to require interdisciplinary
inputs, it helps if your team is appropriately collaborative. If
possible, you want it to include so-called ‘T-shaped’ people.
These are people with a strong central expertise or area
of knowledge but with the empathy and capacity to look
beyond their own discipline for correlations, opportunities,
and convergent interests. These people have, according to
Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO, “Openness, curiosity,
optimism, a tendency toward learning through doing, and
experimentation.”
Of course, at a certain stage you will need to prioritise and
decide which design challenge you will focus on. Through
a process of judicious distillation and by testing competing
ideas against one another, you should come up with a refined
design brief.
Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt describe the design brief as
“a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a
framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they
can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized
– such as price point, available technology, and market
segment.”
The lessons of HCD dictate that briefs should not be
prescriptive but focus on meeting the need, which may only be
fully understood with further study. As Brown and Wyatt say,
“A well-constructed brief allows for serendipity, unpredictability,
and the capricious whims of fate – the creative realm from
which breakthrough ideas emerge.”

Dr Elin Haf Davies is the Founder of Aparito, an innovative
patient-centric medical technology company that helps
drug companies to develop treatments for patients with rare
diseases, of which there are over 6,000 affecting 350m people
world-wide. The most vulnerable are in remote communities in
developing countries with limited healthcare systems and poor
connecting infrastructure.
The Aparito solution captures data from ‘diseases in motion’
through wearable sensors and video connected via smart
phones to their Atom5 digital platform. This helps with clinical
trials, providing a rich real-time dataset to support marketing
authorisation and healthcare utility to support market access.
On the back of 20 years of looking after children undergoing
clinical assessments and seeing how stressful it was for
patients and their families, Davies knew that there must be a
better, more efficient way to conduct the process, especially
as digital technology was revolutionising every other sector.
Rowing the Atlantic gave her the belief that she could be the
agent of change. After gaining her doctorate, she started
Aparito and, with money from the Newton Fund, determined
to be the first to investigate the genetic profile of epilepsy
sufferers in South Africa (where there is a disproportionately
high incidence) as a way to develop her ideas for a technical
solution.
One of her first moves was to engage with clinical geneticists
at the Red Cross Hospital in Capetown, and hit it off straight
away, agreeing a common goal that, she says, was ‘worth
its weight in gold’. Indeed, all the subsequent learnings from
qualitative interviews with carers proved extremely useful,
yielding lessons that Aparito still uses today.
Engaging with stakeholders and end-users with open,
human-centred design approach unveiled many blind spots.
As she says, “While we had an idea of what we wanted to
find out, the realities for those children and families meant we
encountered challenges and issues that we would not have
experienced in another setting.”
For example, although they knew that smartphone ownership
was fairly widespread in South Africa, which was partly
why it was targeted, she had not appreciated that many of
the devices are in fact home-made, meaning that Aparito’s
software was not always compatible. Nor had she appreciated
the fear surrounding the risk of mugging from wearing Aparito
equipment outside of the home. Finally, there was a strong
lesson about the useability, acceptability and feasibility of the
equipment design: keep it simple.
Since then, Aparito has gone on to secure £1.4 m in
investment and won twelve contracts across four continents.
“Working in this space is incredibly rewarding,” she says.
“I’m lucky to be in this community and to drive forward with
positive impacts.”
https://www.aparito.com
APARITO
16
‘The most vulnerable are
in remote communities in
developing countries with
limited healthcare systems
and poor connecting
infrastructure.’
CASE
STUDY 2

This is the time for an honest, practical reality check when you
uncover real responses from users. It typically leads to further
iterations, refinements or wholesale pivots.
It is important that you acknowledge the challenges. There are
many barriers beyond culture and language. For example, you
will need to understand the local legal and regulatory context,
the ways to build trust and enthusiasm in communities, and
how to avoid unintended consequences.
To develop a new, useful, and workable commercial idea
almost by definition requires collaboration. It is the moment
when you start to really lean on the extraordinary wealth of
information held by the partners and end-user representatives
you identified in the previous phase.
Develop
18
This next phase is a process of generating, developing and,
importantly, validating ideas from a brief by developing a minimum
viable product (MVP). This is essentially a low-cost way to test your
biggest assumptions by putting a basic model of your product or
service into your customer’s hands.
Sometimes at the request of your investors, there is a
temptation to play your cards close to your chest so as not
to reveal your concept to competitors. To do so though is to
shut down opportunities for beneficial cross-fertilisation of
ideas with people outside of your disciplinary silo. Especially
for ideas targeting public-good social, economic and
environmental development in low or middle-income countries,
a wide and far-reaching network is your value-laden friend.
Elin Haf Davies, Founder of medtech company Aparito (see
case study), is clear about the benefits of collaboration.
Getting everybody’s input and covering your own personal
blind spots might be slow and laborious, but it’s the only way
to get on the right path.

“There’s a wonderful African
proverb which goes, ‘If you want
to go fast, go alone, but if you
want to go far, go together.”

Fight Back is a safety training company that delivers self-
defence training in Nepal to counter the risk of sexual violence.
They provide innovative programmes using physical, vocal and
mental techniques to increase safety.
Initially they focused on providing small workshops for
20-30 women at a time, targeting organisations such as
banks, hospitals, NGOs etc that had frontline workers. After
participating in the SPRING accelerator, which trained the
CEO in human-centred design methods, they set a design
challenge to expand their market, asking, ‘How might we
provide safety education to reach adolescent girls in Nepal?”
Through user and stakeholder engagement, they ran focus
groups with girls, parents and teachers. This led to an
opportunity in one school to test a minimum viable product
with a difference: to train 400 girls at once.
This experiment in ‘en masse’ training produced fascinating
results. They learned that it was not only possible but had a
much higher impact. The large group sessions created an
electric atmosphere, a sense of collective empowerment and
peer support amongst the girls who felt safe to speak about
taboo subjects for the first time.
From a business model perspective, the MPV demonstrated
the potential of a new market and a product that could be
delivered at an affordable price point for parents and schools.
CASE
STUDY 3
FIGHT
BACK
20
Since then, the team have continued to iterate in response
to new design challenges. For example, the schools wanted
something for the boys to do while the girls were in the
training. Fight Back have developed a course for boys, as well
as tailored workshops for parents and teachers, all designed
to help reduce the risk of sexual violence.
Within 12 months of delivering the first MVP, revenue
increased four-fold and the business raised £500,000
investment to scale up.
https://fightbacknepal.com

‘The Cradle VSA solution’s
breakthrough technology is an
affordable hand-held device
that combines blood pressure
and heart rate measurements
into a single index.’

The Cradle Vital Signs Alert contributes to meeting the UN’s
Sustainable Development Goal 3 to reduce the global maternal
mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030.
The dangers of childbirth are very severe in the developing
world. A recent World Health Organization report states that
approximately 800 women die in pregnancy or childbirth every
day, 99% of them in low and middle-income countries.
Simple and cost-effective interventions are available but delays
in recognising problems and reacting in time are a barrier.
Accurate measurement of vital signs is key to early recognition
and timely intervention.
Developed by Professor Andrew Shennan of King’s College
London, the Cradle VSA solution’s breakthrough technology is
an affordable hand-held device that combines blood pressure
and heart rate measurements into a single index. The results
display includes a simple traffic light alert system giving the
healthcare workers unambiguous information about the level of
danger and what to do next. It won the Newton Prize in 2017.
By now a mature and well-known product, it has undergone
almost continuous prototyping and iteration in field trials to
validate its technical accuracy and to qualitatively evaluate its
user-friendliness and appropriateness. Over the years this has
involved a huge network of academic researchers, volunteers,
trial participants across many countries as well as more formal
collaborators bound together by good will.
These include manufacturer Microlife, who have been
involved in developing and refining all iterations of the device;
JHPIEGO, an international health organisation that helped
put together the trial training packages, and Medical Aid
films, which makes culturally sensitive and appropriate health
education films.
Country-specific help in setting up trials involved close
collaboration with a bewildering number of NGOs and
research bodies including Maternity Worldwide, Pre-empt Trial,
Safe Motherhood Programme at the University of California
San Francisco, the Women’s and Children’s Health Research
Unit, KLE University in India, the Sanyu Africa Research
Institute in Uganda, Hope Health Action in Haiti, and the
Welbodi Partnership in Sierra Leone.
The first iteration of the device – Cradle 1 – involved field
studies in Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe funded by the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation.
Cradle 2, with $1m from the Bill & Melinda Gates Grand
Challenges Explorations fund, evaluated the refined device in
a South African high-risk institutional setting and in community
settings in India, Pakistan, Mozambique, and Nigeria.
With the new version, Cradle 3, and a new educational
package, the development team set out to determine whether
widespread implementation would have a worthwhile impact,
leading to pilot trials in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and India, and
main trials in ten countries including Uganda, Sierra Leone,
Ethiopia and Haiti. It was funded by the Medical Research
Council and the Department of Biotechnology India.
Finally, the Cradle 4 trials focussed on pre-eclampsia in Zambia
and India, funded by the Medical Research Council. It started
with a feasibility study to evaluate how acceptable planned
early birth would be to women, their partners and healthcare
workers, a human-centred design approach that sought to
understand the local context and incorporate users’ views.
All this work has yielded rich feedback that, with intelligent
interpretation, has seen the product improve continuously
to the point where it is being adopted in healthcare systems
across the world. For example, the Cradle 1 field studies
discovered that the device’s batteries were prone to loss and
theft. The team’s response was to replace it with a micro-
USB charger and sealed lithium battery, feasible because of
the concurrent explosion in the use and availability of mobile
phones, even in low-resource communities.
http://cradletrial.com
CRADLE VITAL
SIGNS ALERT
CASE
STUDY 4
23

With a background in medical engineering, David Sarphie’s
journey with his AquAffirm™ concept began when he
matched advances in chemical sensor technology with the
dangerous, stubborn, and difficult-to-manage problem of
arsenic contamination in drinking water.
The problem affects people in both developing and developed
countries around the globe. The World Health Organisation
(WHO) estimates that 130 million people drink water
containing arsenic (mainly naturally occurring but also as the
result of pollution) above safe levels, with short-term exposure
causing skin lesions, skin cancer and damage to the cognitive
development of children, while long-term exposure leads to
fatal internal cancers (e.g. bladder, lung and liver) among 10%
of those affected.
With 70 million people at risk due to drinking water from 8.6
million tube wells, Bangladesh is especially vulnerable. Arsenic
poisoning kills over 40,000 Bangladeshis every year.
The long-term solution is a clean mains water network. In the
meantime, people still rely on well water for their daily lives.
There are several ongoing problems. The first is that there is
no easy way to tell if water is contaminated. The second is
that concentrations of arsenic in water from the same well
vary over time.
AquAffirm answers the first problem with an innovative test
strip that is relatively cheap, the manufacture of which is low-
risk and scalable.
They are addressing the second problem through the
connected test strip reader and back-end machine-learning
geo-tagged database – currently under development - that
will help governments to map and monitor wells, share the
information with citizens, and predict when safety thresholds
are breached. The data should eventually be able to guide
where and how deeply to dig wells so that they remain safe.
AQUAFFIRM™
24
‘With 70 million people at
risk due to drinking water
from 8.6 million tube wells,
Bangladesh is especially
vulnerable. Arsenic
poisoning kills over 40,000
Bangladeshis every year.’
David is clear about the value of prototyping, an important tool
for HCD. “Getting our prototypes into the hands of the people
who will be using them gives us important insights into how
they will be used in practice. It led to improvements in our
waterproofing system, for example.”
He also acknowledges the value of early engagement with a
Professor of Geology at Dhaka University and a research team
based at a University in Chennai, India, and of the impetus that
securing Newton Fund grants afforded him.
Although the need is urgent, the process of developing robust,
trustworthy, sustainable products and systems is slow. David
again: “I’m a marathon runner so I’m used to taking the long
view on things. Certainly for us it has been a marathon not a
sprint. But if we can do it, we should do it, and Innovate UK
support has been instrumental in getting us this far.”
https://aquaffirm.com
CASE
STUDY 5

Your product or service will not yet have received its final
polish, and so you will probably not have entered into any
long-term manufacturing, distributor, or reseller contracts.
All that comes later, after you have validated your solution in
the market and investigated the risks of unintended negative
consequences. Only then can you and your investors agree
that it is possible
to scale up.
A financially viable business model is dependent on hitting the
sweet spot between a need and real market demand. This is
just as true of solutions that contribute to the UN Sustainable
Development Goals as it is of purely commercial enterprises.
However, implementing a product or service is, in a sense,
an open-ended project. Your first commercial offering will not
be your last. Your packaging and marketing information will
continuously evolve. Your commercial agreements will change.
Against a backdrop of changing human needs and fluctuating
economic conditions, no innovation can ever be said to
be complete.
The truth is, innovators can never rest on their laurels. What
they can do, however, is gather enough positive reality-
checked feedback to give them the confidence to take the
plunge into commercialisation. Thus, the main output of this
phase is when you prove the concept in the market with a
prototype that you can sell.
Deliver
During the delivery stage you
switch your focus more closely to
designing a prototype business
model for exploiting all the learning
incorporated into your idea from
earlier phases.
While we are used to the term prototyping applying to the
repeated testing of the physical product itself, it should apply
equally to the surrounding ecosystem of enabling services -
manufacturing, distribution, promotion, engagement, and so
on – that the product needs to reach its market.
Tim Brown and Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO emphasize how
important the prototyping phase is for solutions destined
for the developing world. After all, this is where the lack of
infrastructure, retail chains, communication networks, literacy,
and other essential pieces of the system often make the things
that we take for granted ‘unexpectedly difficult’.
27

About two-thirds of the developing world’s three billion rural
people live in about 475m small farm households. Many are
poor and food insecure, with limited access to markets
and services.
Like all farmers, their activities are helped if they have access
to credit to bridge the gap between planting and harvest.
However, this access is rarely granted because of climate
risks, poor supply chains, and lack of knowledge about
techniques for improving yields.
The Digifarm innovation platform aimed to address
this issue in Kenya, where 7 million households depend
on smallholding outputs to supplement their food. Now
successfully deployed in Kenya with partners Safaricom and
the Vodafone Group, it shows how prototyping made an initial
good idea much stronger.
Safaricom had launched M-PESA, a USSD platform that
allows you to send your phone credit to another person,
enabling quick, trustworthy commercial transactions to pay
bills or save money. It is astonishingly successful, having
reached over 20.5 m users and helped to move 2% of rural
Kenyan households out of absolute poverty.
Safaricom and Vodafone realized that the system could be
transformative for smallholders, and conceived the idea of
the Digifarm platform as a way of extending them credit. As
a first step, they wanted to understand the specific needs
of smallholders to define the product roadmap working with
Dalberg Design’s human-centred design team.
The results showed a nuanced picture. Smallholders needed
credit, but faced other risks, not least the different experience
of men and women, the lack of good seeds, herbicides,
fertilizers and other inputs, unstable markets, and a lack of
information. Without fixing these other risks, adoption of credit
services was likely to be low.
The solution was a one-stop shop platform answering all
smallholders’ questions, bundling services flexibly according to
user need.
Developing the bundles has been a process of continuous
rapid prototyping in collaboration with Mercy Corps AFA
to meet farmers’ need for a wide range of services about
crops, livestock, and horticulture requiring deep expertise.
The platform is therefore collaborative, incorporating a shared
revenue model with owner Safaricom providing the platform
and partners iProcure as the agricultural goods supplier,
FarmDrive the credit scorer, and Arifu providing interactive
content. Later prototyping has moved to interactive SMS chat
with timely tips and advice.
Digifarm’s minimum viable product was launched in three
Kenyan counties in 2017, registering 200,000 dairy farmers
and with 60,000 active users, far surpassing expectations. By
June 2018, after launching an input loan scheme, registrations
grew to 700,000, 35% of them active, and attracted 200,000
loan applications. The third major development was to provide
users with a digital marketplace, linking them to fair-price
buyers, pushing registrations to over 1 million users.
https://www.safaricom.co.ke/business/digifarm/what-is-
digifarm/digifarm
DIGIFARM
INNOVATION
‘The solution was a one-stop
shop platform answering
all smallholders’ questions,
bundling services flexibly
according to user need.’
28
CASE
STUDY 6

Learning
from failure
31
The story of innovation is about learning from
failure. In a sense, that is what the testing and
iteration all the way along the development
pathway is all about: try, fail, adjust, try
again, and repeat the cycle until you get a
breakthrough. It highlights the importance of
having the passion, grit, tenacity, bravery and
determination to see things through.

32
There are two modes here. Proceed to market without testing
your blind spots and assumptions, and suffer an expensive,
high-impact, and probably terminal failure. Or follow the
mantra: fail often, fail fast.
The latter mode is the increasingly accepted, welcomed way
forward. Despite our natural reluctance to admit failure, the
dangers of not doing so, especially in fields such as medicine
or emergency relief where the stakes are especially high, are
much more important.
The topic was brilliantly dissected by Matthew Syed in his
book ‘Black Box Thinking’. The black box of the title refers to
the recording devices on board commercial aircraft that are
central to the aviation industry’s collective commitment to learn
from its mistakes.
He tells the story of James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless
vaccum cleaner, which took much iteration to refine into a
workable solution. Dyson was not the first, second or even the
third to come up with the idea. “But he was the only one with
the stamina to ‘fail’ his concept into a workable solution.”
Rather than stigmatize failure, Syed concludes, as business
leaders we should “praise each other for trying, for
experimenting, for demonstrating resilience and resolve, for
daring to learn through our own critical investigations, and for
having the intellectual courage to see evidence for what it is
rather than what we want it to be.”
This attitude is at the heart of HCD. It allows you to learn in
‘quick, cheap, and dirty’ steps, as Tim Brown and Jocelyn
Wyatt of IDEO put it, harnessing your limited resources for
optimal efficiency.
Dr Bhavin Engineer of b.e. Design has seen the process both
as an innovator and as a supplier to start-ups. Failing fast and
often avoids expensive fixes later. “Many of us fear failure,” he
says. “Fair enough, but you need to get your head around the
fact that your first effort isn’t going to be the thing that works.
Get comfortable with that. It’s normal.”

‘... praise each other for
trying, for experimenting,
for demonstrating resilience
and resolve, for daring to
learn through our own critical
investigations, and for having
the intellectual courage to
see evidence for what it is
rather than what we want it
to be.’
In fact, the reasons for failure are less to do with the technical
solution or the cultural barriers and more often to do with
factors that, while critical, are at the periphery of the main need.
For example, in the rush to go to market, developers may
not have considered their product’s long-term maintenance
requirements deeply enough. This might not be to do with
its longevity or the cost of replacement parts but the lack of
a reliable local infrastructure for spare parts or maintenance
personnel to get to where they are needed. For example, while
there are about 375,000 hand pumps installed in Africa to
supply drinking water, well over a third of them are abandoned
due to poor maintenance or construction.
Being aware of the potential risk from day one allows you to
tackle the problems early, giving you the time to design viable
workarounds and avoid expensive mistakes.

The PlayPumps International product, first conceived back
in 2005, is an object lesson in how innovation can fail. More
importantly, it also shows how the experience should be
recycled honestly and transparently to avoid repetition, turning
a bad outcome into a positive lasting good.
The product appeared to answer a need – how to get drinking
water from a well – with a technical solution – a pump. The
innovation was in how it was to be powered: by children
playing on specially designed equipment in the form of a
merry-go-round.
The idea was that happy energetic children would expend
their excess exuberance in hours of play on the merry-go-
round, which, in turn, would supply all the local community’s
water needs for the day, only for the whole process to be
repeated again the next day and every day thereafter. On
the face of it an extremely attractive idea, it drew excited
endorsements from Laura Bush, the Case Foundation, and
Save the Children.
Unfortunately, it did not live up to expectations. The system
was expensive. The pump was prone to breaking and was
difficult to fix. More importantly, it could never have met all
the communities’ water needs. An article in the Guardian
reported that the pump could theoretically provide the bare
minimum water requirements for 200 people a day based
on two hours’ constant play every day, which is considerably
less than was claimed.
Even worse, it is not clear that it met the real need, which was
to supply clean water in water-stressed regions. PlayPumps
could never do this because of its technical limitations.
In the end, dozens of PlayPumps sat idle in Mozambique
where they were first implemented, only to have hand pumps
reinstalled in their place.
This catalogue of failures points to the importance of
thoroughly understanding the issues and need before settling
on a design, let alone implementing a solution.
That is not to say that PlayPumps have not done good.
While they might not meet all the water needs or address
the real issue of water scarcity, they do serve a purpose,
especially in school playgrounds, for example. Equally, the
product has brought opportunities for play to children who
might not otherwise have had them, and has sparked other
play-related innovations.
On the other hand, the implementation fell far short of having
the impact expected. The Case Foundation decided to openly
admit the project’s shortcomings, regroup, and take the effort
forward in more effective ways by supporting the Water for
People initiative.
Jean Case of the Case Foundation is philosophical about
the project. She hopes that by being transparent about their
failure, the whole philanthropic sector will end up a little wiser
and closer to solutions that make a difference. As she says,
“We’ve learned that progress comes through trial and error,
and much of what we enjoy today is because somebody
somewhere was willing to blaze new ground.”
http://www.playpumps.co.za
34
PLAYPUMPS
INTERNATIONAL
“We’ve learned that progress
comes through trial and error,
and much of what we enjoy
today is because somebody
somewhere was willing to
blaze new ground.”
CASE
STUDY 7

The GCRF Demonstrate Impact
Competition is part of the global
effort to reach the UN’s Sustainable
Development Goals by 2030,
deploying funds to tackle the
challenges of social, economic and
environmental inequality.
It is vital that this funding has the maximum
impact. Pursuing a human-centred design
approach to innovation increases the likelihood
of adoption, resulting in feasible, viable,
sustainable solutions.
If you have innovative ideas that could help
address one of the sustainable development
goals we encourage you to get in touch. Talk to
the KTN team. Attend our events. Network. And
above all, apply for funding.

It is of course important to have
good factual intelligence about
a region or country to guide your
business development plans.
There are countless consultancies,
interest groups, NGOs, trade
bodies, and others trying to track
actual conditions and market data
and predict future trends. They are
very useful.
There is also a group of public
interest organisations that provide
authoritative data for free. The
ones that you will find useful in
assessing the viability of your ideas
are set out below.
38
Useful sources of quantitative data
The United Nations (UN)
https://data.un.org/
A website containing numerous
databases or tables collectively known
as ‘datamarts’ covering a wide range of
statistical themes including:
• Agriculture
• Crime
• Communication
• Development assistance
• Education
• Energy
• Environment
• Finance
• Gender
• Health
• Labour market
• Manufacturing
• National accounts
• Population and migration
• Science and technology
• Tourism
• Transport
• Trade
It oversees some specialised databases,
too:
• https://unstats.un.org/unsd/mbs/
app/DataSearchTable.aspx Monthly
Bulletin of Statistics Online
• https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/
indicators/database
SDG Indicators - i.e. statistics about
the UN’s Sustainable Development
Goals
• https://comtrade.un.org
UN Comtrade – data and statistics of
official international trade statistics
The World Health Organisation
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/
indicators
The World Health Organisation
maintains the Global Health Observatory,
a database that includes rich variety
of indicators including everything from
alcoholism to zoonotic events.
International Labour Organisation (ILO)
https://ilostat.ilo.org
Chief source of data about issues to do
with labour, covering many topics from
child labour and unpaid work to the
working poor and health and safety at
work.
The World Bank
https://data.worldbank.org
World Bank data has huge amounts of
free, up-to-date, global data about:
• Agriculture and rural development
• Aid effectiveness
• Climate change
• Economy and growth
• Education
• Energy and mining
• Environment
• External debt
• Financial sector
• Gender
• Health
• Infrastructure
• Poverty
• Private sector
• Public sector
• Science and Technology
• Social development
• Social protection and labour
• Trade
• Urban development
You can search it by country or
groupings of countries.

39
OECD
https://data.oecd.org
OECD has comprehensive, up-to-date,
global data about:
• Agriculture
• Development
• Economy
• Education
• Energy
• Environment
• Finance
• Government
• Health
• Innovation and technology
• Jobs
• Society
Again, you can search it by country,
although the list is not comprehensive.
Our World in Data
https://ourworldindata.org
They publish public good data dispelling
or confirming myths about the world.
Topics include:
• Health
• Demographic change
• Food and agriculture
• Education and knowledge
• Energy and environment
• Innovation and technological change
• Poverty and economic development
• Living conditions, community and
wellbeing
• Human rights and democracy
• Violence and war
SDG Tracker
https://sdg-tracker.org
A website that contains statistics
tracking progress against the UN’s
Sustainable Development Goals.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The IMF has some potentially useful
forecasting reports called World
Economic Outlook Reports
(https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/
WEO) and Regional Economic Reports
(https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/
WEO).

The Global Challenges Research Fund
(GCRF) is a £1.5 billion fund announced
by the UK Government in late 2015
to support cutting-edge research that
addresses the challenges faced by
developing countries.
https://www.ukri.org/research/global-
challenges-research-fund
Knowledge Transfer Network is Innovate
UK’s network partner and also provides
innovation networking for other funders in
line with its mission to drive UK growth.
https://ktn-uk.co.uk
UK Research and Innovation works in
partnership with universities, research
organisations, businesses, charities, and
government to create the best possible
environment for research and innovation
to flourish. We aim to maximise the
contribution of each of our component
parts, working individually and collectively.
We work with our many partners to
benefit everyone through knowledge,
talent and ideas.
https://www.ukri.org
Innovate UK is part of UK Research and
Innovation, a non-departmental public
body funded by a grant-in-aid from the
UK government. We drive productivity
and economic growth by supporting
businesses to develop and realise the
potential of new ideas, including those
from the UK’s world-class research base.
https://www.gov.uk/government/
organisations/innovate-uk

GCRF Demonstrate Impact Programme Report 2020

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