The Power of Digital Inclusion: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Announces Living Progress Challenge Winners

Revolutionizing volunteerism, helping high school students find the mentors they need, expanding financial inclusion, and cracking down on illegal fishing—what would you do to help change the world and accelerate opportunity for millions of people around the world using software and digital services?

Hundreds of people answered that call in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Living Progress Challenge that launched in December of 2015. On August 3, the company announced the four winners, selected from 10 finalists during the Living Progress Challenge Finals, held live in Brooklyn, New York.

With a goal to improve the lives of 1 million people by 2020, the Living Progress Challenge combines information technology, with HPE expertise and the wisdom of the crowd to accelerate opportunity for people around the world.

Founder and CEO of AngelHack, Sabeen Ali, keynote speaker at the event said, “Today we’ve learned what can happen when revolutionaries partner with innovation giants – we can make the impossible, possible.” 

World Wildlife Fund and TRAFFIC were among the winners for their solution: Detect IT: Fish, which uses trade data to fight illegal fishing. The world’s most heavily traded food commodity,  global estimates suggest that more than 30 percent of all fish caught globally is done so illegally. Their prototype is a web-based tool leveraging HPE Vertica analytics technology to identify the potential trade flows of illegal products. The tool analyzes the data reported through trade reports between different countries and tracks discrepancies, making it possible to identify illegal products at a global scale and start investigations.

“…Today our oceans and the creatures that live in the sea are in crisis. Immense amount of fish are being stolen from the sea. A conservative estimate is 26 million tons of fish are illegally caught each year,” said Michele Kuruc of WWF during her presentation. “The ocean simply can’t sustain this level of wrongdoing and the World Wildlife Fund, with the help of HPE and Topcoder, is in the process of building a web-based application to try and help and identify these bad guys because right now it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

The three other winners included: HPE Business Process Improvement Team Guadalajara for MentorME, which connects high school and college students to mentors; Points of Light for a solution to transform how people find volunteer opportunities online; and Pact for WORTH 2.0, a tool to enable community savings groups to simplify group record-keeping and increase economic advancement. 

“It was a day full of inspiration, creativity and emotion,” said Chris Wellise, senior director of social innovation and sustainability at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. 

Nearly 400 ideas and more than 130 proposals were submitted from around the world. The ideas were crowdsourced from the global community. Teams then prepared proposals that detailed how ideas could be built and deployed. Proposal and idea submissions were narrowed by a board of HPE and external reviewers. The four winning solutions will be built and deployed with the assistance of HPE.

“(The Living Progress Challenge) goes beyond social good,” Wellise said. “The Living Progress Challenge is a way for HPE to actively participate in the idea economy in a manner that effects people and the environment in a positive way. The thinking behind the challenge is to generate ideas from the crowd. We are not experts in social impact, we’re technology experts.”

Learn more about the winners of the Living Progress Challenge from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.