The Hult Prize at SSE

The Hult Prize is the world’s largest student competition for social good. It is a kind og social entrepreneurship competition to tackle a pressing social issue, and the winning team gets 1.000.000$ to make their solution a reality. This year, the challenge was to provide early childhood education to 10 million kids living around slum areas.

This competition is becoming more and more popular with every year that passes, and this year my friend decided to organize the first round of the Hult Prize competition at my university, Stockholm School of Economics (SSE). The competition took place last Monday, and it was a total success! I helped out to organize a bit the teams and to do some team building dinner for the Hult at SSE organizing committee 😀

Different teams came up with different solution on how they would solve the early childhood education issue, with the winning team proposing to build extremely cheap toys that kids would use to improve their cognitive, motor and spacial skills by themselves. This was the winning team (with the judges), which will pass to the next round of the competition in London:

There was one other idea that I found really interesting: The given team found that there were already plenty of childcare facilities in most slum areas, but that these just didn’t have enough money to be run. Additionally, they found out that since there are no toilets available, people just defecate in plastic bags and just send them to the street (these plastic bags are called flying bags! XD). So they came up with a concept in which the child’s family could store their defecations/poo in a plastic bag, and then bring it to a facility where these human wastes could be turned into energy, and could also be used to make bricks to build new houses. By doing so, the families could almost entirely finance their child’s education! Pretty cool and unconventional solution!

The judges were all really important people. One of them was the founder of Klarna, a company started by an alumni from my school which currently has over a billion $ in turnover! 😀 Anyway, if you want to read more about the Hult Prize at SSE, check out the facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/hultprizeatsse

Any way, it was a really fun evening which ended up with some wine and loads of tasty food! In my opinion, social entrepreneurship (doing well by doing good) kicks ass and is something totally needed in today’s sociiety! Making profit by helping to create a better world is just pure awesomeness.