labor under difficult conditions and most of them are women these projects will explore holistic solutions to boost labor productivity of smallholder farmers in subsaharan africa with a specific emphasis on increasing the productivity of women farmers labor to revolutionize current approaches to crop protection management and harvesting projects include vaibhav tidke of the institute of chemical technology in mumbai will design and test a lowcost movable dryer called cassavatech to easily and quickly dry large quantities of cassava a major staple crop grown by women smallholder farmers the majority of harvested cassava is dried to make flour and chips but traditional hand drying methods take between five and fifteen days new approaches for detection treatment and control of selected neglected tropical diseases neglected tropical diseases ntds are a large and diverse group of diseases that disproportionately affect the poor in the developing world and typically lack attention and funding for research and development these projects are working to generate novel approaches to the treatment and control of ntds by improving the detection of parasites developing drug treatments that are safe effective and affordable and interrupting transmission with the ultimate goal of ridding the world of these infectious diseases projects include judy sakanari of the university of california san francisco and manu prakash from stanford university in the united states will develop an inexpensive electromagnetic detection device to identify and diagnose parasitic worms to help infected patients get well faster using animal infection models they will develop an easytouse electronic bandage enabling ultrasensitive detection of tissue changes caused by worm movement or physical changes in the adult worms over time following drug treatment the bandages will ultimately be tested in humans and could be designed to transfer data remotely for realtime monitoring of the effects of drug treatments in the field