2011-2012 CHALLENGE

For the 2012 Global Ideas Institute, students are focusing on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s challenge to “reinvent the toilet.” They are considering not only the technical dimensions of a toilet that is off the electricity and water grids and affordable for the world’s poor, but also the social, political, and economic factors for a sustainable sanitation program. Working in teams and led by mentors from the Asian Institute and Munk School’s graduate programs, the students work in a distributed learning model to share readings and online and face-to-face discussions. In April, their teams will identify and pitch their preferred approach to reinventing the toilet. The symposium will take place at the Munk School and will feature a panel of experts in the health and development field.
The work the students do is fully integrated across the many fields and disciplines involved in such a complex problem. They are reading and grappling with everything from academic research papers to news clippings, from sophisticated demographic materials to the personal stories of those directly working in the field. They are struggling with real-world problems through multidisciplinary lenses. They are learning about advocacy, empathy, and other-regarding global citizenship. They, along with their U of T mentors, receive no credit for their work, other than the gratification of studying a pressing problem that has not yet been resolved, together generating solutions that can potentially better the lives of hundreds of millions in the world’s “bottom billion.”

U of T’s Peter Singer, the CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, best summed up the aims of the Global Ideas Institute when he conveyed the following to students and their mentors: “So I just want to end by saying how humbled I am to be with you, because you’re going to solve this problem. And what you’re learning, refl ecting on, and doing in your project here is going to help solve the problem. You’re focused on something extraordinarily important. Not just to provide better care in the developed world and innovate there, but also to solve some of the problems your neighbours are facing ... Good on you and good luck; what you’re doing is extraordinarily important and is itself innovative.”

SESSION VIDEOS

October
Global Public Health Challenges
Dr. Anita M. McGahan
Associate Dean of Research, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

November
Appropriate Technologies and Reinventing the Toilet
Dr. Yu-Ling Cheng
Director, Centre for Global Engineering; Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto
>view seminar webcast

December
Solving Tough Problems Through Integrative Thinking
Ms. Ellie Avishai
Director, I-Think Initiative, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

January
The Psychology of the Last Mile Problem: Why End Users Don’t Adopt Innovative Solutions and What We Can Do About It
Dr. Dilip Soman
Director, India Innovation Institute; Professor, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
>view seminar webcast

January
Involvement of the Public, NGO, and Private Sectors in Knowledge Translation, Implementation, and Scaling
Dr. Stanley Zlotkin
Professor, Paediatrics, Public Health Sciences, and Nutritional Sciences, University of Toronto; Vice President, Medical and Academic Affairs, The Hospital for Sick Children
>view seminar webcast

February
New Models for Financing Innovative Technologies and Entrepreneurship in the Global South
Dr. Murray Metcalfe
Professor, Globalization, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, University of Toronto

MARCH
Blind Spots in the Welfare State: Lessons from the Global South
Dr. Joseph Wong
Canada Research Chair, Political Science; Director, Asian Institute, University of Toronto
>view seminar webcast

FINAL SYMPOSIUM

• Opening Remarks
• Student Presentations

• Feedback from Expert Panel
• Keynote Address
• Closing Remarks

To see this year’s Symposium, click here:
Heath Innovations in the Global South, April 17, 2012

View the Symposium brochure here.