18 Low-Cost Social Innovations

From car repairs to entrepreneur kits to anti-malaria net beds, these low-cost social innovations attempt to make quality products at an affordable price. A common theme here is health. For instance Mentis Tree is a community interest company and not-for-profit organization that offers psychological therapy and other mental health programs in East Anglia, Suffolk, United Kingdom at a low cost. A much larger health care company is Maternova, this time a for-profit social business that attempts to be a marketplace for inexpensive medical tools in countries including Haiti, Zambia, India and Honduras.

While we've covered many organizations and enterprises on SocialBusiness.org, many of them are service oriented but the low-cost social innovations featured here often mix both product and service, perhaps leaning on the product side.