Global

As a young student, Alexander Mtambo was passionate about technology. Graduating with honours in Electronics and Computer Engineering from the University of Malawi, he gained practical experience working with Telkom Networks Malawi Limited in the Radio Access Network department.  Working with the team that installed 4G networks in more than ten…

UNICEF’s Innovation Fund goes beyond just offering seed funding to its companies. We connect them to UNICEF’s community of global experts and partners – and to each other, providing pathways to accelerate their solutions to market and connecting solutions to each other to build globally scalable platforms. On February 5-7, the UNICEF Innovation…, What is the potential of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science to solve big challenges in the AAC field like the lack of interoperability between symbol systems?, There are no viable AAC systems or technologies which translate how a concept is represented in one symbol set to how it may be represented in another symbol set, preventing greater communication mobility for AAC users. AI technologies have shown great potential in translating between languages as well as in generating automatic descriptions of…, What new opportunities can emerge for AAC users from making different symbol sets and communication boards publicly available and open source?, AAC symbol sets are either not open source or not shared/easy to locate on the web under a creative commons license. This can create a duplication of efforts around the development of symbols sets, and additional challenges for multicultural communities who need access to multiple symbols sets. Moreover, without this publicly available data, the…, Can we contribute to and build on an Open Board Standard that creates greater interoperability between AAC applications?, Most AAC applications make it difficult for speech and language therapists, parents and other users to import or export communication boardsfrom one application to another due to incompatible board formats. This can create additional work and obstacles for AAC users to personalize their communication boards. The UNICEF Innovation Fund…, How are we collecting the data we need to show evidence of impact?, When using AAC applications, speech and language therapists are required to evaluate an AAC user’s progress — but that data is rarely collected through an AAC application (usually paper-based), making it difficult for an AAC company to demonstrate evidence of impact. The UNICEF Innovation Fund accessibility cohort will work with mentors to develop…