Last June Google.org launched RechargeIT, an initiative to accelerate the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles. At that time we announced a request for investment proposals (RFP) from teams working on technologies relevant to this goal. Today we are pleased to announce our first RechargeIT investments in two promising companies tackling the challenge of vehicle electrification.

Aptera Motors of Carlsbad, California is building an ultra-high efficiency vehicle based on improved aerodynamics and composite materials. Aptera's first prototype achieved over 230 miles per gallon during testing, and they are developing an all-electric as well as a plug-in hybrid vehicle based on this design.

ActaCell is an Austin-based company working to commercialize lithium-ion battery technology developed at the University of Texas at Austin. ActaCell's technology offers the promise of improved battery cycle life and lower costs, while maintaining a focus on battery safety, all of which are important factors in the widespread adoption of plug-in vehicles.

Both of these innovative companies and their capable teams are working to develop technology that is crucial to helping us realize the RechargeIT vision: millions of plug-in vehicles on the road.

Posted by Karl Sun, Google.org Investments Principal

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Last summer Google.org launched the RechargeIT program, an initiative to accelerate the commercialization of plug-in vehicles. As part of this project, we created the GFleet, a free car-sharing program for Google employees. The GFleet includes a handful of hybrid vehicles converted to plug-ins with a Hymotion conversion module.

Our plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have been on the road for about a year now, and the RechargeIT team has been diligently collecting statistics on their performance. We noticed that employees primarily use our plug-ins for short trips close to our headquarters, so the data weren't truly representative of typical U.S. driving patterns. We were curious to see how the cars would perform under controlled conditions - and how they would stack up against other conventional automobiles typically found in U.S. households. With that, the RechargeIT Driving Experiment was born!

In total, it took just over seven weeks to complete all the trips in all the vehicles. And with the results in, our plug-ins did great, with the Priuses getting more than 90 miles per gallon. The PHEVs not only greatly outperformed the average American fleet fuel economy of 19.8 MPG, they did significantly better than the standard hybrids – 53% fuel economy improvement for the plug-in Ford Escape and 93% improvement for the plug-in Prius.

Check out our newly improved RechargeIT website for more details on our Driving Experiment.

Posted by Rolf Schreiber, RechargeIT Engineer

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HakiElimu, one of Google.org’s partners, recently released an important report about the quality of education in Tanzania to stimulate a national discussion about the challenges facing the education sector. Media coverage in Dar es Salaam indicates the report has already made an impression and is prompting the government to act.

For too long, success in the education sector has been defined by the number of schools and classrooms built and by the increase in student enrollment - measures that don't necessarily register learning. But the conversation is now shifting: "quality" has become more front and center, forcing governments and development agencies to re-evaluate their policies.

It’s hard to address the “quality” issue without knowing what children can and cannot do. Part of HakiElimu’s report captures a “snapshot of the quality of education actually provided in schools by presenting the results of short tests administered to children in primary and secondary schools.” The sample pool is small, but the findings are interesting indicators of what may be happening in much of the country. Here are two of the findings that I found most powerful and alarming:

• One of the tests was a short dictation in both Kiswahili, the national language, and English (a total of 483 primary school students and 559 secondary school students were tested). While students scored higher on the Kiswahili dictations, HakiElimu found it “concerning that 25% of primary pupils’ Kiswahili dictations were rated “poor.” Pupils who took this test had completed six years’ of schooling in Kiswahili and yet one in four were unable to write a coherent paragraph as dictated in the national language. In the dictations, students in both primary and secondary schools made fundamental errors in punctuation, giving researchers the impression that these things are not taught in schools. Children were often using the improper case for letters. Similarly, many did not appear to have a sense of spacing between words, or between letters in the word and between sentences. Knowledge of punctuation was also limited” (page 29)

The next point is equally alarming: Primary school students are taught in Kiswahili while in secondary schools the language of instruction is in English. As the report indicates, this is problematic.

• “Overall, data show that while children’s Kiswahili language competencies are generally well developed, English language competencies are poorly developed in both primary and secondary school students. Students had difficulty in reading, writing and translating the language. This is particularly troublesome in case of secondary school students. On entering secondary schools, children not only have to relearn all the terms and concepts in a new language but also to take on a more difficult set of subjects. If the majority of the students in secondary schools are unable to read and understand the language in which they are taught, as our data show, it is difficult to see how their learning can be enhanced. (page 33)

My colleagues and I often say “you can’t fix what you can’t see.” This report helps to highlight to communities, organizations and the government that while money might be spent on education, there are still significant gaps in learning outcomes. More information and data about these outcomes help create the metrics, so action can be taken to fix these gaps. We are proud of HakiElimu's work and their commitment to ensuring that citizens and government know more about the quality of education in Tanzania. We believe that the information and the discussions it is sparking in Tanzania are important first steps toward improving the educational system.

Posted by Juliette Gimon, Program Manager, Google.org

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I recently returned from a research trip across four East African countries. Every time I return from the region, I am energized by the dynamism of the young people I meet but overwhelmed by the challenges the region faces. The combination of high oil and food prices affects the United States economy, to be sure, but the impact on poor people in poor countries is exponentially greater. People have to make hard decisions like taking their children out of school, rationing the little food they have, and in some cases not eating at all. High fuel prices also contribute to lower uses of fertilizer, resulting in lower agricultural yields. The cycle spirals in a way that hurts the poorest people the most.

And yet there is another story unfolding simultaneously in Eastern Africa. It is the story of Safaricom, the most successful telecom company on the continent. Safaricom started trading publicly on the Nairobi stock exchange in June and catalyzed the largest IPO on the continent ever. More than $800 million was raised from Kenyans from all walks of life, resulting in an over-subscription of stock of more than 400%. Mobile is growing faster in Africa than in any other part of the world. While levels of internet penetration are well below 5% for the continent, nearly 40% have access to mobile phones and Nairobi sends more text messages in a single day than New York (a statistic frequently quoted in the region).

Ten years ago people were talking about land lines and how they would ever penetrate rural Africa. Infrastructure has long been a constraint on economic development and growth in Africa but nobody imagined that a new technology would completely leap-frog the traditional phone and fundamentally disrupt telephony in Africa. I can't help but think about rural energy in the same light. Today, countries like Uganda are still 90% unserved by electricity. Can you imagine not having power in 90% of any country and still trying to grow the economy? Do we expect Africans to wait for grid electricity to incrementally reach people or are there disruptive innovations that can provide off-grid renewable energy to rural Africans in scaleable ways? What would this look like given large geo-thermal and bio-diesel reserves in East Africa and can renewable energy sources provide opportunities for greener solutions in Africa?

Interacting with dynamic and bright Africans under 30 (who make up 70% or more of most African countries), I cannot help but wonder what is on the horizon. People are innovating all over the continent with bio-gas, small scale hydro, wind, and solar power. Where people have electricity, there is a massive difference in economic activity, public services, productivity, and hope about the future. Energy is truly a platform that affects nearly every aspect of rural life. Today, Africa is mostly unserved by power grids but given innovation possibilities, are there not scalable ways to introduce renewable energy to millions of people who are completely unplugged from the global economy today?

Posted by Aleem Walji, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org

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Major kudos to HealthMap, one of our early grantees, for their work using free, web-based data sources to facilitate early outbreak detection and make it public on Google Maps.

HealthMap just published an excellent overview of their work and findings in the journal PLoS Medicine. The article, "Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project," is definitely worth a read. Wired.com thought so too and posted here about HealthMap's Google.org supported efforts.

We're proud to support HealthMap as they continue to hone their methodology and expand their coverage, including the addition of Hindi, Portuguese, and Arabic language information sources to their current suite of Chinese, Spanish, Russian, French and English. Way to go HealthMap...keep up the good work!

Posted by Corrie Conrad, Associate, Predict and Prevent

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