Published 27 June 2019

Last updated 14 February 2020
+ show all updates

Published 9 April 2019

Last updated 14 February 2020
+ show all updates

The project is taking action to address equality for indigenous girls and women in Guatemala through improved access to quality education.

Teenage pregnancy continues to be one of the most pervasive social problems in Guatemala today, and the British Embassy, together with the Organization for the Development of the Indigenous Maya (ODIM), has concluded a project to help more than 30 teenagers in the areas of San Juan and San Pablo La Laguna.

The programme aims to reduce child marriage and adolescent pregnancy through quality education. Early pregnancy affects girls’ access to education and statistics show that rural Mayan girls are almost half as likely to finish primary school as their urban counterparts are.

ODIM tackled this complex issue by providing a place for adolescents to receive training in life skills, gain valuable knowledge, and access mentoring from peers, including their own family members and learning from content in their own language to last over several years.

The project also provided community education and meetings for mothers, in order to give them the opportunity to interchange ideas about how to handle the changes their adolescent children are going through, and to better understand sexual and reproductive rights.

The UK continues to be committed to ensuring over a million girls in some of the poorest countries, including girls who have disabilities or are at risk of being left behind, receive a quality education. By addressing sexual and reproductive health, this project aims to build a strong cohort of participants, including girls and boys, confident in their ability to make decisions that best meet their needs and hopes for their futures.

The British Ambassador to Guatemala, Nick Whittingham, said:

Societies are stronger and better when girls and women have more opportunities and are able to make decisions about their future; and it is even better when boys are involved in understanding this from a very young age.

Tech to cut congestion will get a £1.5 million boost through a government fund for councils and SMEs to promote trial projects.

The funding forms part of the Govtech Catalyst, a £20 million fund to help solve local transport issues through tech. This could help reduce the huge cost to the UK economy resulting from congestion by calming rush hour traffic and improving air quality and road safety for drivers.

Whether commuting long distances or using public transport for the school run, the 3 winning projects will trial new ways of using data generated by transport in towns and cities to improve driving conditions for thousands of people.

Driving in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole could soon be much safer thanks to new software developed by Vivacity. The transport company’s sustainable software monitors traffic, flagging incidents in real time, allowing traffic control operators to respond quickly and stop traffic jams forming.

Working closely with Oxfordshire Council, Technology SME IM23 is creating a tool which predicts and tackles congestion by helping traffic controllers understand how to keep traffic moving while making efficient improvements to their road network.

Based on York, INRIX’s plans to use vehicle tracks to map vehicle ‘paths’ optimising and improving traffic signals in the city. This will allow traffic to flow more freely, reducing journey times, red lights and stress for drivers.

The projects will be managed by the Department for Transport for 12 months.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said:

Congestion isn’t just bad for our environment, productivity and communities – it also has a huge impact on our national economy. That’s why, as well as our multi-billion-pound investment in rail and buses to improve connectivity, we are opening up city centre, transport and traffic management to new digital innovators.

Transport technology is a growing global sector with the potential to help reduce congestion, emissions and improve connectivity. Today’s (14 February 2020) competition winners show how world class UK transport tech companies are helping millions of people in our towns and cities every day.

Peter Mildon, Chief Operating Officer, Vivacity Labs:

Vivacity will be heading a project that looks at how a blend of data sources and predictive Machine Learning can be combined to provide proactive traffic management tools to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council. Vivacity are excited to be working with Siemens for this project, with both companies building on work carried out in Phase 1 of the GovTech Challenge.

James Gilchrist, City of York Council assistant director for transport, highways and environment, said:

We are thrilled to be pioneering innovative ways of using data to improve traffic management in the city. This will help us to make better informed decisions, reduce congestion, prioritise road space for sustainable transport and help to increase the reliability of bus services.

We are very excited to have the opportunity to work with INRIX in this GovTech Challenge project to further explore the Performance Analysis Trajectory Help tool. We have seen real benefits with the early prototype, and hope that continuing with this ground-breaking project will lead to a better road network for residents, visitors and businesses. We will also be able to share our lessons learned from the project with other local authorities.

Called COLKa for ‘Columbus Ka-band Terminal’, the system will allow astronauts and researchers to benefit from a direct link with Europe at home broadband speeds, relaying data from experiments on the ISS back to Earth almost instantaneously.

The fridge-sized device is due to launch aboard a Cygnus supply ship from Wallops Island, Virginia just before 9pm UK time on Friday. Two astronauts will carry out a spacewalk later this year to mount it to the outside of the Columbus module on the ISS.

Dr Graham Turnock, CEO of the UK Space Agency, said:

This is the first major industrial contribution from the UK to the ISS and it will revolutionise the ability of scientists in the UK and Europe to access the results of their experiments.

This is yet another example of the UK economy benefiting, through investment, jobs and new skills, from our continued collaboration with the European Space Agency.

The data will be transmitted to a ground station at Harwell, Oxfordshire, near ESA’s European Centre for Space Applications and Telecommunications, and from there it will be transferred to the Columbus Control Centre and user centres across Europe.

Columbus was conceived and designed over 20 years ago, when the internet was in its infancy. The laboratory was launched to the Station in 2008 and uses the Station’s network and NASA’s infrastructure for communications with the Columbus Control Centre.

The upgrade will ensure faster communications, independent from the NASA system, to relay much more data from experiments allowing researchers on Earth to see the results of their experiments in near real time.

David Kenyon, Managing Director at MDA UK based in Harwell, which designed and built COLKa, said:

The COLKa program has firmly established MDA in the UK as a leading provider of high quality space equipment, positioning us for continued business growth and new jobs in both communications and space sensor markets.

The know-how gained from designing, building and running COLKa could be used for ESA’s communications package that is being designed for the Lunar Gateway – an outpost over 1000 times further from Earth than the International Space Station.

The contract was awarded to MDA following the UK Space Agency’s investment of £40m in ESA’s space exploration programme in 2012. In November 2019 the UK committed a further £180 million to the global exploration programme, which, along with the lunar gateway and lunar communications, will include bringing back the first samples from Mars and support the US ambition to have a sustainable presence on the Moon through the Lunar Gateway and the lunar communications programme to support astronauts and robots on the Moon.

The UK’s space sector is going from strength to strength, employing around 42,000 people and carrying out world-class science while growing the economy.