The three winners of USAID's 2008 Development 2.0 Challenge were:

• Child Malnutrition Surveillance and Famine Response uses mobile technology solutions to improve the speed and quality of nutrition surveillance data for children in Malawi. The effort is led by a team of six students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), who are working alongside UNICEF to develop an open source mobile phone platform for nutritional data.
• Click Diagnostics enables health- care practitioner networks and micro-entrepreneurs to provide advanced medical consultation and to gather health data more efficiently because it connects them to our global health servers via mobile phones.
• Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is an open source software that solves communication and visualization challenges during crises situations through mapping and crowdsourcing, allowing anyone to submit crisis information through text messaging using a mobile phone, email or web form.

Check out the list of the 15 finalists for the financial awards from USAID.

Mobile phone technology is another example of a technology that is science based, affordable by the very poor with the right business model, and as these projects demonstrate, capable of providing great benefits in terms of reduction of the worst aspects of poverty.