AloWeather provides forecasts and advice to farmers in Vietnam through an SMS and voice messaging system. Making Treasure from Trash supports women in Ghana to create biogas and biofertilizer businesses. A-Card provides farmers in Bangladesh with debit cards to purchase agricultural inputs from selected retailers.

This was not your average Silicon Valley pitch competition. But recently, six teams from around the world took the stage at Stanford University after going through CARE’s Scale X Design Accelerator, which the international NGO launched to help project teams from country offices advance their ideas to implementation.

"Even programs that we know are highly successful can sometimes take 10, 12, 20 years for us to actually replicate. So how do we expedite that?" Michelle Nunn, chief executive officer of CARE USA, said on stage.

Throughout the pitch night, there were videos on CARE’s approach to innovation. One put it this way: "Humanitarian aid and global development has a problem. It takes too long to bring breakthrough solutions to those who need them most. CARE is disrupting that timeline by bringing innovative ideas to scale faster."

Read the full article about CARE's Scale X Design Accelerator by Catherine Cheney at Devex International Development.