It’s an exciting time for the Level One Project at the Gates Foundation. We’ve just announced the winners of our first Grand Challenges Exploration (GCE), which focused on promoting wide spread acceptance of mobile money by small merchants. This group of nine includes a diverse set of approaches and ideas to products, merchant services, technologies and models that will be developed and incubated in a number of countries, including Nigeria, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Kenya.
Each of the winners obtains a 100,000 USD grant to help them refine and build 
out their idea. Congratulations!
The idea behind this GCE was to provide a forum for those who are willing to think outside the box to help drive merchant acceptance of mobile money – one of the most relevant and critical enablers to a healthy and robust digital economy. Good ideas need a sandbox to grow, and the GCE is all about providing these ideas with the support and independence they need to be successful.
I want to say thank you to every organization that applied (we received a total of 304 applications from 30 countries!) and I want to encourage you to continue exploring outside the castle.
To learn more about the nine award recipients, please visit leveloneproject.org.
Kosta Peric 