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Calestous Juma, international development professor at the Kennedy school of government and a nominator, judge and promoter of new types of prizes, sees awards as part of a complex ecology of financing innovation that includes many other instruments. He believes there should be more prizes for humanitarian work and development. "Doing humanitarian work may look like a thankless job. Yet itis driven by the instinct of empathy that makes us human," said Juma, author of The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa. "Honouring, rewarding, celebrating and inspiring work in this area is more needed today than ever. This is an area that can use more societal recognition, especially at a time when the whole aid industry is under scrutiny." However, Juma says prizes need to be carefully thought out. "Many organisations are launching them without thinking carefully about what prizes can do or cannot do." The AidEx challenge's lead judge, Michael Pritchard, inventor of the Lifesaver water bottle, says the award is not so much about the money — £2,000 — as validation, although the publicity can be a much-needed boost. "The validation goes an awfully long way to get the product developed and provides a big leg-up into getting it into the market," he said. "It gets written up all over the world and gets the oxygen of publicity." As for Thakkar, he says winning the AidEx award has been a positive experience: "Winning the award made a huge difference, it increased publicity. People look more favourably on us and [that] gives us an extra edge. We don't have to sell it as much. But we don't want to be just appreciated, we want the lamp to be used extensively." Back to top Education — Full text articles A Chance at Learning Ginia Bellafante — New York Times This year, a study administered by researchers at Harvard and Stanford drew significant attention for what it revealed about how inadequately low-income students are represented at selective colleges and universities. Only 34 percent of the highest-achieving high-school seniors whose families fell in the bottom quarter of income distribution — versus 78 percent in the top quarter — attended one of the country’s most selective colleges, based ona list of nearly 250 schools compiled by Barron’s. In New York City, where a neighborhood like Bushwick, in Brooklyn, can seem like a satellite campus of Wesleyan anda prewar apartment building on the Upper East Side can feel like an lvy League dormitory for 46-year-olds, there has been considerable philanthropic attention, of the kind other cities ought to envy, paid to finding the most gifted low-income students and putting them ona similar path. In 1978, Gary Simons, a Bronx teacher, founded Prep for Prep with the goal of identifying talented students of color in the city and readying them for attendance at private schools like Dalton and Groton and so on. Hundreds of the program’s alumni have gone on to law, medical and business schools, and employment at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Time Warner. Adecade ago, hoping also to advance the best students attending public high schools, Mr. Simons and others founded another organization, Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, or LEDA, which draws exceptional children from around the country, regardless of race, almost entirely from families who make less than $55,000 a year. Applicants are required to be in the top 10 percent of their class, having taken the most difficult courses their schools offer. The 60 who gain entry to the program each year spend the summer before 12th grade at Princeton, studying ethics, political theory and public policy, and preparing for standardized college entrance exams. In awondrous righting of the current disequilibrium, however small its scale, they are tutored for those tests by the same instructors who work with some of Manhattan’s wealthiest teenagers: the staff of Advantage Testing, whose services cost parents up to $795 an hour. Arun Alagappan, the founder and president of Advantage and a major benefactor of LEDA, provides his employees (whose résumés typically resemble those of the people at Google or McKinsey) pro bono. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019431