The 2008 USAID Development 2.0 Challenge is underway and proposals are already stacking up in the USAID Project Gallery.  You can read proposals, star your favorites, leave comments and collaborate with project teams, or submit your own!

There are four easy steps to participate:

• Register and/or Login 
• Click on Username
• Click on "Submit a Project to the Project Gallery" under My Project Idea
• Select "USAID" from the Prize Tag menu located below Additional Cause Area Tags on the Submission Form

From the Project Gallery

• Mobile News Network in Madagascar
  Overview: After months of training on blogging, podcasting and vidcasting, we started to realize that mobile phone text messaging was the most intuitive, cheapest and most effective way of sharing news and updates from the groups.  When cataclysms occur the network will be ready to bring news from the touched area.  In fact all the Foko members have mobile phones and developed skills in updating news channels such as Twitter.  Read more, vote & comment!
• Frogtek: mobile business solutions for micro-entrepreneurs
  Overview:  In the richer parts of the world any business is supported by technology that gathers and processes data about sales, inventories and so forth. Unfortunately, for many small entrepreneurs in the developing world, such technology is a distant dream. This prevents them from having clarity on their business and limits their income.  However, there are almost 4 billion mobile phones in the world, compared to 1 billion PCs.Why don’t we use this rising computing platform to assist microentrepreneurs, leapfrogging the cash register and even the PC?  Read more, vote & comment!
• Redesign And Simulation Of the University Of Jos Website For Mobile Devices
  Overview: This is all About a project that redesigns my current university website, for wireless mobile phone access. Redesign in the sense that the current one is designed using html (hypertext markup language) and PHP (Php hypertext preprocessor) while this project is designed with WML (wireless markup language) and ASP (Active Server Pages). It goes further to allow students check their end of semester results via their mobile phones. The students of the university will be impacted by this project. After our semester exams, the school prints and pastes the semester results on different faculty and departmental notice boards, thereby wasting paper yearin yearout. Also after exams students travel far and wide and can only get to see their results when they travel back to school. With this project, when a given semester result is out, all the university have to do is in one way or the other notify the students of the availability of their results, which can be accessed via a given URL, this URL will be that on this WAP application, hosted on the university server.  Read more, vote & comment!
• txteagle: Accumulating Savings from Mobile Earnings
  Overview: We have developed a system that enables mobile phone subscribers to accumulate savings by completing tasks for companies who pay them with mPesa (mobile money), airtime, or other currency surrogates. We will also be partnering with regional banks to provide users with the option of transferring their earnings into traditional bank accounts in their name. It is our hope that providing a broad suite of potential payment and savings instruments will inform the design of future savings solutions for the rural poor.  Read more, vote & comment!
• Freecycle.org Global Smartphone/SMS Gift Economy
  Overview:  The Freecycle Network / Freecycle.org is currently keeping over 600 tons a day out of landfills via gifting on it's *website* -- individuals, organizations and companies post used items otherwise headed for the landfills to the local Freecycle group for others in the community to acquire and use. That's five times the height of Mt. Everest in the past year alone if you were to stack this tonnage in garbage trucks.  Our incredible growth rate has been mirrored in every country with good internet accessibility. Our growth rate has been limited in those countries where people don't have computers as we are currently only available via the internet and our website.  Read more, vote & comment!
• Global Stewardship Initiative
  Overview: The Global stewardship Initiative is an umbrella organization designed to raise awareness of individual members' carbon footprint and encourage members to offset the carbon value of their footprint by such activities as planting trees and gardens, using reusable bags, recycling, walking, carpooling, riding bikes, eating less meat, roadside clean-ups and purchasing offsets.  Members will be encouraged to organize community awareness projects and campaigns designed to reduce the impact of Global Warming and greenhouse gases.  Read more, vote & comment!
• Adolosent Girls Empowerment Project- AGE Project
  Overview: Target Area: 10 tsunami affected villages of Nagapattinam district of Tamiladu state,India No./of beneficiaries: 100 Adolosent girls AimL Empowerment of adolosent girls by socio,health and nurional awreness and vocational skiil development. Main objectives: To socio, health and nutrional awareness To imprfove their nutrional staus by start their own kitchen gardens and consume nutrional vegetable and greens. To impart vocational skill for the girls to get self employment and support their families by income contribution. Activities: -Socio,health and nutrional awreness camps and training programmes -promotiona of kitchen gardens -Vocation training programmes Duration: One year Espected impact: - -05 adolosents girls groups will formed for 150 girls -100 kitchen gardens will be promoted in 05 vilages and all the girls will get good nutrional vegetable and greens for their families -100 girls will get new vocational skill and earn income by starting of their own self employment and support their families.  Read more, vote & comment!
• Virtual Consumers Anonymous (VCA - Consumer 911)
  Overview:
  

  A number of new models using mobile 2.0 and web 2.0 to protect consumers from the growing threat of dangerous, counterfeit and substandard products have emerged (re: mPedigree).  Counterfeit goods alone have a trade value in excess of 600 billion dollars according to leading research organisations. The trade in counterfeit pharmaceuticals is around 50 billion dollars. No one knows the extent of market share held by sub-standard products. Their impact though is becoming widely appreciated: fake vaccines in the mid-1990s killed thousands of infants in Niger. Fake heparin has maimed hundreds of Americans since last year. And melanine adulterated milk has led to 55,000 infants developing complications in China. The carcinogenic and allergenic effects of many products are known only to a few highly informed elites.  Read more, vote & comment!

Visit the USAID Development 2.0 Challenge Project Gallery to check out proposals, vote on your favorites, and comment and collaborate with the project teams or learn more about the Challenge.