By EBELE ORAKPO

The trio of Blessing Douglas, Lucy  Okonkwo and Aliyu Ahmed of the American University of Nigeria have advanced to the regional finals of the fifth annual Hult Prize, the world’s largest student competition for social good.

A release made available to Vanguard Learning showed that this year, over 4,000 applications were received from which the AUN team emerged among the best 400. Each team was chosen from more than 350 colleges and universities in over 150 countries.

In 2009, Ahmad Ashkar, a student at Hult International Business School came up with the idea of crowd-sourcing brilliant solutions to world’s pressing problems like food security, education, energy and access to clean water, from college and university students around the world.

This year’s Hult Prize will focus on the 250 million slum dwellers around the world suffering from chronic diseases and who need help – a challenge personally selected by President Bill Clinton.

Ahmad Ashkar, CEO and Founder of the Hult Prize, recognised by former US President Clinton and TIME Magazine as one of the top five ideas changing the world, explained its purpose: “We are giving entrepreneurs from around the world a platform to innovate and revolutionize the way we think about servicing the poor.”

AUN President Margee Ensign said AUN was actually the only Nigerian university to qualify for the competition. “Part of what qualified us is our university’s development mission and commitment to fostering development in our region and the continent, together with the students’ strong, longstanding record of academic excellence and community engagement,” she said.

Fardeen Dodo, an instructor in the AUN School of Business & Entrepreneurship, who will accompany the students to Dubai, said the competition will enrich their college experience. “Besides the competition, students will benefit from several workshops, networking, and entrepreneurial learning events run by a number of professionals and trail-blazing global experts including Stuart Fleming of Enviroserve, Garett Awad of the Scholl Centre of Entrepreneurship, Ali Edrissi of JP Morgan (UK), and Khaled Gazawi, the CEO of Grameen-Jameel.”

The Hult Prize regional competitions which will take place on March 7 and 8, 2014, in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai, Shanghai, and Sao Paulo will see the AUN team competing in Dubai, United Arab Emirates for the one million dollar (US$1,000,000) prize in start-up funding to launch a sustainable social venture. The prize money is donated by Swedish billionaire, Bertil Hult, and his family.

On the significance of the competition to AUN being a development university, Dodo said it is a “demonstration of how far our students are ready to go, to action up our vision of development and commitment to addressing the longstanding social challenges that confront Nigeria and Africa at large.”

Following the regional finals, one winning team from each host city will move into a summer business incubator, where participants will receive mentorship, advisory and strategic planning training as they create prototypes and set up to launch their new social business. A final round of competition will be hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative at its annual meeting in September this year, where CGI delegates will select a winning team, and the prize will be awarded by Clinton himself.

“The Hult Prize is a wonderful example of the creative cooperation needed to build a world with shared opportunity, shared responsibility, and shared prosperity, and each year, I look forward to seeing the many outstanding ideas the competition produces,” Clinton said.
Apart from the US$1 million in seed capital, winners also receive mentorship and advice from the international community.