I-Care

The 10th annual GPPN Conference, hosted by the Sciences Po School of Public Affairs, featured students' solution oriented ideas and prototypes to address public policy challenges identified by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To participate, each GPPN member school carefully selected up to five student teams to present their projects and compete for the GPPN prize. The result: 32 teams from around the world met in Paris to showcase their ideas on how to solve some of the most pressing global challenges of today.

I-Care was selected as the GPPN Prize Winner at the annual conference.

Building on the model of Institute for Professional Care Education and TaskRabbit, utilizing modern technology like Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC), Location Based Service (LBS) and Online to Offline (O2O), I-care is an online platform that utilizes technology and medical data to provide senior citizens with more and better choices. I-Care adopts non-clinical methods to solve health problems, which is identified by the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3. The platform has two main functions: (1) Provide online training courses‑ both for professional caregivers seeking to gain employment opportunities and for family caregivers stepping into caregiving roles. (2) Match seniors with registered professional caregivers based on their special needs and location.

Meet the team

Xinwei Gao is a 2nd year MPA student concentrating on Urban and Social Policy at SIPA. She studied International Relations and Economics double degree at Peking University before SIPA. She was also an exchange student at Sciences Po, Paris for one semester. She has experience in education, environment and energy, health care, gender issues and aging. Her interest lies in aging, healthcare and women’s empowerment. She aspires to start her own social enterprise in the aging industry after gaining more experience in the private sector.

Fang Liu is a second year MPA student from Beijing, China. Before studying in SIPA, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Administration from Renmin University of China. She is interested in social enterprise, special education and education innovation. Fang hopes to further explore the possibilities of socially, financially and environmentally sustainable solutions to development issues, especially in the area of education. In the future, she wants to work with social enterprises or NGOs that focus on education equality.

Kasumi Sugimoto is a PEPM (Program in Economics Policy Management) student at Columbia University from Japan. Before coming to Columbia, she studied at NYU School of Law for LLM program. At NYU, she focused on IP Law, Antitrust Law, and Privacy Law. Before coming to the US, she has worked as a chief of the Ministry of International Affairs and Communications (MIC) in Tokyo, Japan. At MIC, she was responsible for ICT policy, including information privacy protection, content control on the Internet, consumer protection concerning telecommunication services, promotion of utilization of information technology for medical area, promotion of entertainment industry.

CK Seungwook Kim is a student with great interest in inception and management of social enterprise (SE) startups. Before matriculation at SIPA, he worked as an in-house consultant in the International Planning Division at the Hyundai Group in Korea. He has worked on projects ranging from customer satisfaction index management in the Middle East market to Media PR and marketing in the Western European region. Using his project management and strategic planning skills obtained throughout his career, he aspires to start his own social enterprise after his graduation and create an impact in the for purpose/non-profit sectors.

Interested in learning more about the GPPN programs and degrees? Find out here!