Dr. Hayat Sindi has established a social entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem for scientists and innovators to address pressing issues in their communities in the Middle East and beyond. The i2 Institute was the beginning of Sindi’s journey to bring tangible solutions to the most vulnerable. Through its flagship program “Transform,” Sindi and her team worked with a group of innovators around the globe to launch a number of projects: battery-powered refrigerators that use solar energy in the borders of Uganda and Mozambique to store and preserve produce (and, later, COVID-19 vaccines); solar-powered houses in refugee camps in Bangladesh; and an electronic medical platform that employs 60,000 female doctors in Pakistan, providing dignified medical assistance to 100 million women and children in the outskirts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq. “We can come up with amazing and visionary ideas,” she says. “However, they will become real and stronger only when they are connected to society.”
Building a bridge between possibility and hope through social innovation
Dr. Hayat Sindi