OUR STORY
IMAGINATION AS THE FOUNDATION FOR INNOVATION
2005
A group of grad students in Alberta from various professional disciplines began providing opportunities to members looking for short term ways to gain experience and create value for low-income communities.
A trip to Latin America helped members develop insights around the importance of needs assessments and community engagement in co-creating change.
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2006
A second trip to Latin America, this time to investigate human and sex trafficking, fed a deeper understanding of what really determines health and security, and the importance of local ownership for any potential solution.
A design model starts to emerge. It was clear even then this was not just a new not-for-profit that undertook specific project work. ICChange was a movement that would be dedicated to collaborative efforts with local social activists in marginalized communities, to redefine the conventional notions of community development, charity, and aid.
2008 - 2011
In response to the major local challenge of addressing waterborne and air quality-related diseases, and through work with refugees and illegal migrants on the Thai-Burmese border around peace building and energy security, two locally driven, breakthrough innovations resulted: CeraMaji – a ceramic water filter and CeraJiko - small high-efficiency stoves.
Not wanting to be just another project focused NGO offering free gifts, but to be engaged in transforming systems, the focus turned to finding ways to build local owned capacity to develop and market these products at a cost that could attract the attention and commitment of families in the low income communities.
140,000
East Africans supplied with access to clean, potable water.
2010
ICChange worked with the Kenya Red Cross to build a national Trauma Care Policy and trained medical personnel on how to advanced trauma care and how to implement trauma management into the local healthcare system.
52M
Kenyan citizens served by a comprehensive trauma and injury program
2015
A focus on dramatically improving the efficiency and effectiveness of existing Kibera clinics through piloting a disruptive, cloud-based electronic health record system named the Kibera Medical Records Initiative which has been recognized by senior government health officials at the federal and county level.
100,000
Slum-dwellers provided with access to a cloud-based electronic medical records system
2017
Partnering with Slum Dwellers International of South Africa and the Kenyan Government, ICChange is co-leading an action research initiative in the Mukuru slum aimed at helping the government activate its new SPA (Special Planning Area) program for supporting entrepreneurial ideas being driven by people in those communities.
500,000
people impacted, and a scalable model for the redevelopment of informal settlements across the world
2018
This work has ignited the spark for KIMSSEA (Kenya Innovative Manufacturing Site and Social Enterprise Academy), which broke ground in December 2019. The KIMSSEA site will provide a safe space for further testing of all the strategic intentions and the operating principles and values inherent in the ICChange collaborative platform for initiating transformational change to improve health and well-being in vulnerable communities.
KIMSSEA will provide a home for expanding the impact of CeraMaji and will be the test ground in Africa for the new low-cost ventilator being developed by spin-off Metric Technologies.
2020
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, Safe Affordable Ventilators for All was started as a think tank, advocacy and innovation nucleus to fuel the development of ethical medical devices, including ventilators.
