Ask HN: What are some startups working on big problems in the developing world?

Milaap Social Venture https://milaap.org

It is like Kiva , but we crowdfund loans mainly for basic needs of people eg. sanitation(build toilets), water connection, education, enterprise development, energy (solar connection in remote areas) in India

Recently we launched a platform for crowdfunding donations for causes and social initiatives. https://milaap.org/open

Disclosure : I work at Milaap as a senior developer

Thank you for mentioning engageSPARK! Here's a quick summary of what we're building: Our first product empowers organizations to dramatically extend the reach and impact of their pro-poor programs. A not-for-profit business, we're building the easiest to use self-service cloud-based solution to easily and quickly launch comprehensive messaging, surveying, curriculums, and decision tree programs focused on developing countries via SMS, USSD and Voice Calls (roughly half of world’s poor are illiterate) in 200+ countries. engageSPARK will also be the first platform custom built for software developers in developing countries – they will utilize APIs to easily and quickly integrate into multiple telecoms across multiple countries for basic building blocks such as SMS, Voice, USSD, and Mobile Money. To understand the problems we’re solving, please read http://engagespark.com/blog/is-sms-really-solution-change-vo... .

You seem proud. Slap yourself on the back from me, too. Such great work! And lay one on for Shaddi. What a dude.

Not.

This is ... centralized, US-led, heavily geopolitically partisan communications networks sold with vague economic development overtones. Any realistic evaluation would find it hard to conclude other than that such networks will chiefly be used to justify further US and Australian meddling (eg. extreme communications interception... such as the Indonesian president earlier this year) in this region.

Instead, we should lobby for FirefoxOS to drop cellular as de-facto and embrace alternate link-layers, ad-hoc and mesh! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=945047

Education: http://www.rumie.org/

Rumie is a Canadian non-profit who makes $50 tablets containing built-in educational contents to make education more accessible for kids from the developing countries. These tablets have a long battery life and they only need to be connected to the Internet once every couple of months to update the content.

I believe they're also working on creating a community to produce more open sourced educational content for kids. They also don't go out and "sell" their product; they only work with organizations who come to them believing that the tablet is suitable for the intended community.

I'm not affiliated with them but learned about them at a conference last year and thought what they were doing is pretty awesome. I could've remembered some details wrong though so check out their site yourself.