FEATURE
The 2018 Global Finals
and Gala Awards at the
United Nations
The theme of the 2018 Hult Prize Challenge
was “Transform—Harnessing the Power of Energy”.
It asked teams to focus on building sustainable, scalable,
social enterprises that harness the power of energy
to transform the lives of 10 million people by 2025.
The Finals And the winner is…
Forty two teams made it into the summer-long
Hult Prize Accelerator Program, and an elite
group of six teams were chosen to present at the
global finals. On September 15, 2018 at the UN
headquarters in New York City, these students
competed for the grand prize of USD $1M of
startup capital. Creating a new wave of social
entrepreneurs and changemakers, Dr. Stephen
Hodges, President of Hult, describes this as
“higher education with a higher purpose.” From
Brown University to the University of Oxford to the
University of Rwanda, over 100,000 students
responded to the call. SunRice from University College London were the
winners of the 9th Hult Prize Challenge. They are
a rice drying service that aims to reduce rice
wastage and empower rice farmers in Southeast
Asia. Former President Bill Clinton congratulated
all competing teams and recognized the Hult Prize
Foundation for not only investing in SunRice but for
being a movement that is influencing a generation
by “making the definition of ‘us’ bigger and ‘them’
smaller.” He went on to announce the theme for the
highly anticipated 10th Anniversary Hult Prize
Challenge, which will tackle the problems
associated with youth unemployment.
Meet
the 2018
Hult Prize
judges
Ibrahim AlHusseini
Founder
FullCycle
46
Venus Brown
Founder and CEO
Buddah Brown
Entertainment
Arianna Huffington
Founder and CEO
Thrive Global
Jeetu Patel
Chief Product Officer
Box
Paul Polman
CEO
Unilever