Winner of Brands that fall in love, SIC4Change is dedicated to improving the quality of life of people and putting the focus and objectives on those most in need. We spoke with Blanca Pérez, the director of SIC4Change, so that she can tell us first-hand what it is like to undertake in the social world, what objectives are set and how her project works.
1. – When did SIC4Change emerge? How is it created?
SIC4Change arises, like many initiatives, from a moment of crisis. The two people who founded it came from a long history in the world of international cooperation and were somewhat frustrated by the large amount of effort and resources invested in solving social problems and the few results that were being achieved.
From then on, we began to wonder and dream about what an organization would be like that would be truly efficient in tackling challenges such as poverty, child malnutrition, migration… and we realized that there were 3 key tools that, for example, in the business world apply as the basis of their activity: 1) talent, 2) social and technological innovation and 3) what we like to call unlikely alliances. On these pillars we created SIC4Change in 2017.
2. – What goals did you have when it was launched and what are you pursuing now?
Our goal has been, from the beginning, to promote social justice, that is, we work to reduce inequalities derived from issues such as place of birth, ethnicity, age, gender, or any difference of origin. With this principle and the previous tools, we have specialized in sectors such as the fight against child malnutrition and maternal health, job placement and youth entrepreneurship, migration, or violence against women and girls in indigenous communities.
3. – How can your service help and what kind of public?
During these 5 years we have developed different initiatives with great impact. For example, more than 8,500 children die every day from malnutrition. Most of these deaths could be prevented with early identification of their nutritional status, but in developing countries and, above all, in rural communities, there are neither the resources nor the capacities to do so.
From SIC4Change, we have developed Nut4Health; an app that promotes the active search, home by home, for children with malnutrition. It does so by creating a network of community agents who receive an economic incentive for each case found. It is built on a blockchain technology architecture, which allows full transparency and traceability of funds.
In addition, it geolocates the cases, informs the nearest health centers so that they can follow up, and allows all identified cases to be displayed on a map and in real time. We have already deployed Nut4Health in Mauritania and Guatemala and, just in its first months, we have been able to diagnose more than 3,000 minors early and prevent premature deaths or sequelae in the medium and long term.
Like Nut4Health (www.nut4health.org), we have developed other high-impact technologies such as SAVIA, whose objective is to accompany indigenous families with nutritional counseling through SMS on their mobile phones, or EnREDa, whose objective is to identify and validate the collective’s competencies young people and offer them resources that facilitate their labor insertion.
4. – After winning “Brands that Fall in Love”, what are your next challenges?
Since 2017 we have grown very fast. We have verified that our starting premises were valid and that we are occupying a gap that was empty but that it was necessary. We are already in 4 countries (Spain, Peru, Guatemala and Mauritania), we have a team of almost 30 people specialized in technological development, economics, engineering, sociology, etc. We have more and more strategic alliances and people who become partners, not only because we offer them trust and transparency, but because they know that we achieve results in people’s lives.
Our next challenge is to reach the MOON. That moon that, for us, is reaching more than 100,000 people with solutions that improve their lives. To do this, we call on people, entities or professionals who, with their know-how, their contacts, their resources or their will, want to join this mission.