Urbana, IL – University of Illinois announced today that Professor Brian Lilly is a Grand Challenges Explorations winner, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Brian Lilly, Adjunct Associate Professor, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project, in the category of Labor Saving Strategies and Innovations for Women Smallholder Farmers titled “Water Irrigation Pump Built from Automobile Components”.
Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Brian Lilly’s project is one of more than 80 Grand Challenges Explorations Round 11 grants announced today by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
To receive funding, Brian Lilly and other Grand Challenges Explorations Round 11 winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of five critical global heath and development topic areas that included development of the next generation condom, agriculture development, and neglected tropical diseases.
Three quarters of the world’s poorest people get their food and income from farming small plots of land and most of them labor under difficult conditions. It is estimated that worldwide there are over 600 million smallholder farmers. In the developing world, the majority of these smallholder farmers are women. They grow a diversity of local crops and livestock species and must contend with pests, diseases and drought, along with unproductive soils and a lack of irrigation. Productivity on these plots in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia is extremely low compared to the rest of the world, both in terms of yield and in terms of labor.
Irrigation is one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive activities of women farmers. Often times they carry the water long distances. Professor Lilly has proposed to design, develop, and build a water irrigation system that uses off-the-shelf, low cost, and readily available automobile components. The pumps are solar powered and therefore require minimal input from the farmers. Because the system uses low cost already manufactured automobile components, the final product can be affordable to the smallholder farmers and rapidly scaled to meet the enormous demand.
Brian Lilly will collaborate with the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC) in the College of Engineering on this initiative. “I’m really excited to get the students involved in this project. Their enthusiasm and passion to improve the world is unmatched.”
About Grand Challenges Explorations
Grand Challenges Explorations is a US$100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, over 850 people in more than 50 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of US$100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to US$1 million.
About the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC)
TEC provides students and faculty with the skills, resources and experiences necessary to become successful innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders who tackle grand challenges and change the world. Created in 2000 to highlight the University’s rich history and culture of innovation, TEC continues to inspire its students to become the next generation of world-changing visionaries, leaders and entrepreneurs.