The world's 86 million temporary or migrant workers often lack access to technology to find jobs, exposing them to fraud and abuse from employment agencies as well as lack of access to health care, insurance, education and training. The 2011 Monster Challenge: Improve Life for Temporary and Migrant Workers states that "successful innovations will advance search technology in ways that empower migrant workers to seek out and access work opportunities as well as resources to better manage their lives."
The Indian Mobile Initiative won the $10,000 Monster Challenge. The four MIT sophomores behind the idea are partnering with Indian universities to encourage students in India to use mobile technology to address social challenges and create entrepreneurship opportunities. Through several workshops in India, student instructors from MIT are leading Indian students in using mobile technology applications to solve problems in their societies. This approach is designed to hone the Indian students' social entrepreneurship skills. The MIT team's work will be documented on the MIT Global Challenge website.
MIT's Global Challenge is an offshoot of the IDEAS Competition, which has awarded more than $260,000 to 60-plus teams since 2001. The teams have implemented innovative service projects to improve the lives of tens of thousands of people in 28 countries. More than half of these projects are still active. The annual IDEAS Competition and Global Challenge launches on September 1 and ends on May 1. Students who receive awards have a year to implement their ideas.
Participants in the competition do not have to be affiliated with MIT, but teams must be 33 percent MIT students to win an award. The university encourages people, especially MIT alumni, to support student innovation as public service by posting a problem for teams to tackle or offering to help. Among the currently posted problem sets are sanitation, electricity and water Distribution in Sierra Leone's Lakka Peninsular community; research and development in Honduras; and using indigenous crops and trees in Kenya to provide income-generating products.