December 12, 2002 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Three nonprofit organizations and two individuals were honored by the Tech Museum of Innovation for their creative use of technology to benefit society.
The San Jose, Calif., museum received more than 460 nominations, representing 59 countries. Five panels of judges assembled by the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University selected the winners, who received $50,000 each.
This year’s nonprofit winners include:
- International SeaKeepers Society, in Miami, was honored in the environmental category for developing new, low-cost equipment to monitor the health of the oceans and deploying the technology on private yachts and cruise ships. After the module is installed, it automatically transmits data on weather and ocean conditions to the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. The data are then distributed to scientists around the world by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Tom K. Houston, president of the organization, says scientists have traditionally gathered marine data using ships outfitted with special monitoring equipment — at a cost of at least $15,000 per day. By contrast, he says, the SeaKeepers module costs roughly $60,000 to build and install on a vessel, pier, or buoy.
The organization hopes that now that the technology has proven itself, developing countries — which have not been able to afford the cost of traditional monitoring — will start to use it to gather data on waters along their coasts.
“Those oceans and that water eventually make their way all over the world, spread by ocean currents,” says Mr. Houston. “So things that are happening off the coast of Africa will eventually have an impact on the waters of the United States.”
- ApproTEC, a nonprofit group with offices in Nairobi, Kenya, and San Francisco, won the award for economic development. The charity — whose name stands for Appropriate Technologies for Enterprise Creation — was honored for developing a manually operated irrigation pump. The pump works like a small StairMaster, and allows farmers to pull water from as deep as seven or eight meters and irrigate two to two and a half acres a day.
On average, the farmers in Kenya and Tanzania who have bought the $75 pumps have profits of $1,200 a year, more than 11 times what they earned before they were able to irrigate, according to ApproTEC.
“Instead of waiting for the rain and then getting one or at most two rain-fed subsistence crops a year, all of a sudden you’re getting three or four very high-value conventional crops a year,” says Martin J. Fisher, ApproTEC’s technical director. “And you bring them out during the dry season when the price is very, very high.”
The organization hopes that it will soon be able to bring its irrigation technology to other African nations, particularly Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa.
- The Light Up the World Foundation, in Alberta, Canada, took top honors in the equality category for its work developing low-cost, renewable home-lighting systems powered by water mills, solar panels, wind and water turbines and pedal generators. The organization’s lighting systems are used in the Dominican Republic, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
The museum will accept nominations for next year’s awards through May 2, 2003.
For more information: Go to http://www.techawards.thetech.org.
