The ADC will be an apprenticeship-based institute that will invest in the development of Africa's most creative minds, operate as a hub for innovation and collaboration, and lead African growth through high-impact and human-centered design.
Semi-Finalist

ORGANIZATION NAME: The Blue Economy Initiative
LOCATION: Assam State, India

Living Lots, an adaptable, open source land-access platform and dynamic community empowerment initiative, works to identify unused urban spaces and catalyzes efforts to reclaim them as focal points for civic engagement. Living Lots allows formerly disenfranchised residents to both collaboratively engage with and directly challenge top-down city planning.

Agrarian Trust’s goal is to nurture the birth of a paradigm shifting, cooperatively owned farmland commons.

bioMASON reduces global greenhouse gas emissions, by providing a better, cleaner, and cost effective bio-cement for use in masonry building materials. bioMASON is currently headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina; a central hub for biotechnology research.

SUMMARY: OMEGA, which began as a NASA biofuels research project to meet the demand for liquid fuel without using land, freshwater, or fertilizer, evolved into a broad-reaching plan for a “system of systems” to integrate algal biofuels production with water recycling, solar energy production, and compatible aquaculture, among many other components.

One-People-One-Reef is a collaboration between a multidisciplinary science team and Pacific-island communities in the outer islands of Micronesia, working together to integrate traditional knowledge and conservation practices with modern science in order to find comprehensive solutions to declining fisheries and degraded reefs.

Sandele Eco-Retreat and Leaning Centre is a unique eco-tourism project in the politically and logistically challenging environment of South Gambia in West Africa. It is exemplary not only in its passionate dedication to regeneration, sustainability, wildlife protection, renewable energy, the use of natural building materials, and local citizens' education and personal development, but in its unusual commitment to transferring ownership to the local people.

The Forest School is an outgrowth of Casa Pueblo, a grassroots citizens’ movement that emerged 35 years ago in Puerto Rico to prevent open-pit mining in the island’s central mountain region. After 15 years of struggle Casa Pueblo succeeded in preventing what would have been irreversible damage to the core of the island’s ecological health and a cascade of destructive socio-economic effects, and helped create Puerto Rico’s first state forest, protecting watersheds and 19 separate landholdings linked by biological corridors, which became Puerto Rico’s National Model Forest, an inspiring model for the global community.

Warka Water (WW) it is a tower designed for social and educational activities with also the function to provide potable water to rural communities facing challenges in accessing this fundamental resource for life. WW provides clean water from the atmosphere under specific meteorological and geographical conditions.

Algal Turf Scrubbing generates a fast growing, easily harvested, filamentous polyculture of hundreds of natural, locally adapted algae species over a new, highly efficient 3D screen surface beneath a shallow flow of water to oxygenate and purify water, produce biomass for biofuel and organic fertilizer, mitigate pollution from agricultural run-off, improve freshwater and coastal habitats, and sequester carbon and reduce fossil fuel dependency.

AskNature is an immense, web-based interactive database and learning tool which seeks to catalog and present solutions to the most pressing human challenges by enabling its audiences to draw from time-tested strategies evolved by nature. AskNature aspires to make bio-inspired design widely accessible for educational and industrial applications.

Ecosoftt is an emerging Singapore and India-based social enterprise that is the first to develop decentralized, adaptable, chemical-free, cost-effective water systems that combine rainwater harvesting, wastewater recycling, groundwater replenishment and other technological innovations in Asia.

Gardens for Health International, an NGO pioneering the integration of nutrition-based agriculture into the clinical care of malnutrition, partners with rural Rwandan health clinics to implement healthcare strategies that include nutritional education and the nurturing of home gardens of nutrient rich foods for each family. They are seeking to expand this program throughout Rwanda and into Uganda, Burundi, and beyond. This elegant model could be replicated globally to address malnutrition.

SUMMARY: Multifunctional Membrane: Self-Active Building Cells, Not Building Blocks are the centerpieces of a technology that could potentially provide inexpensive, biodegradable, living, breathing "skins" for buildings that would auto-regulate in response to heat, light and humidity and provide climate control, ventilation and lighting without mechanical systems, thereby radica

Slow Money catalyzes the flow of investment capital into local food economies and place-based enterprises in North America and Europe, seeking to “bring money back down to earth” through communications, education, convenings, investment clubs, liaison services, and shared learning networks.