Bloomberg Philanthropies today announced the 15 winning cities of the 2021-2022 Global Mayors Challenge, a worldwide innovation competition that supports and spreads cities’ most promising ideas. These 15 winners are being recognized for designing the boldest and most ambitious urban innovations to emerge from the global COVID-19 pandemic. The winning ideas address one or more of four current issue areas in cities including economic recovery and inclusive growth; health and wellbeing; climate and environment; and gender and equality.
ROURKELA, INDIA’s initiative of supporting solar-powered cold storage, plus women entrepreneurship to reduce waste and distress selling of commodities is awarded one million dollars, in addition to technical support and coaching over three years. The goal of the initiative is to set up a digitized cluster-based solar cold storage and use electric vehicles to distribute commodities to various categories of consumers. The cold storage will be used by the vendors for the safe storage of their items. The vendors would have the options of either retrieving these items as per their requirement, or marketing them via the cold room operators. The entire system will be operated and managed by the women federation providing them with a new and meaningful livelihood opportunity. Citizens of Rourkela will have the convenience of ordering vegetables sitting in the comfort of their homes.