Anu and Naveen Jain to announce winner for Women’s Safety XPrize

- ADVERTISEMENT -

Indian Americans Anu and Naveen Jain will be awarding the winning team for the Women’s Safety XPrize on June 6 at the United Nations.

“I have always been passionate about empowering girls and women around the world, and today I am inspired by the potential of technology to find a solution for the safety of girls and women around the world,” Anu states on their website.

“The Anu & Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE challenges teams to leverage technology to keep women and communities safe,” the website adds.

The competition started about a year ago and featured five teams.

Each team was to come up with a technological solution to advance women’s safety by: triggering location-accurate alerts in emergency situations even in low-connectivity scenarios, transmit those alerts to a network of responders, and rapidly provide a response to the user within 90 seconds that help is on its way and then exhibit a novel approach to building or combining existing and/or emerging technologies to better connect users and responders under $40 of the device cost.

The teams’ work is judged by Lauren C. Anderson, an internationally recognized geopolitical and international security consultant, and a distinguished former FBI executive; Judy Feng, an Antenna Engineering Program Manager at Apple, Inc.; Sunish Issac, the Chief Engineer at RLE International and Dr. Shruti Kapoor, an award-winning gender equality activist, economist, and social entrepreneur.

The winning team will be awarded $1 million.

“The United Nations lists gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls as a as a critical sustainable goal. Safety is a stepping stone in achieving this. The goal of the prize is to use technology to find a solution which would allow communities to rapidly respond to threats against any of its members, ensuring that help is always available,” it states on the website.

According to their website, Anu is an entrepreneur and active philanthropist who is also the President of the Anu Jain Family Foundation and the Founder of the Anu and Naveen Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE.

Anu holds a B.A. in Business Administration and Economics from SUNY and an M.B.A. from Rutgers University while she grew up in Jerusalem and lived in many different countries, being a UN child.

Naveen is also an entrepreneur and philanthropist who is also the founder of Moon Express, World Innovation Institute, iNome, TalentWise, Intelius, Infospace, in addition to serving as an advisor to the UK Longitude Prize and as a member of the Explorer club, according to their website.

He is also a regular contributor to Forbes, WSJ, INC and Huffington Post, and is focused on finding entrepreneurial solutions that address global challenges in health, education, poverty, agriculture, and access to clean water, for which he has been recognized globally.

Together, Anu and Naveen have three children who have reflected the views and qualities of their parents.