Bill Clinton to host Hult Prize Finals: MBA News

By QS Contributor Updated Aug 27, 2019

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Introduction
Social entrepreneurs challenge: ‘solve global food crisis’

Bill Clinton to host Hult Prize Finals: MBA News main image

The Hult Prize 2013 will reach its conclusion tonight as former US president Bill Clinton hosts the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting in New York.

From an initial 11,000 applicants from more than 150 different countries, the competition has now been whittled down to six teams of business school students, themselves all winners of regional events held in July and August.

The six finalists who are to pitch their ideas in front of a panel that will include Bill Clinton and Nobel Prize-winning economist, Muhammad Yunus, are representing the following business schools: McGill University; University of Cape Town; ESADE Business School; Asian Institute of Management; London School of Economics, as well as Hult International Business School, who host the event together with the Clinton Global Initiative.

Social entrepreneurs challenge: ‘solve global food crisis’

Bill Clinton set these budding social entrepreneurs the challenge of responding to the global food crisis that sees one quarter of all children going hungry, and yet as much as a third of all food production going to waste.

However, the Hult prize itself is the brainchild of Ahmad Ashkar, an MBA alumnus of Hult Business School. Ashkar founded the prize in 2009 after successfully securing the sponsorship of his alma mater as well as the promotional backing of the Clinton Global Initiative.

The winners of this year’s grand prize of US$1m of startup funding will be laid squarely at the feet of the social entrepreneurs so that they can enact their business model. This marks a change from previous years, in which Hult Prize funds went either in part, or completely, to charities. However, Ashkar has now taken the decision to take the NGO’s out of the equation because he felt the potential for conflict between MBA graduates and the NGOs in question could impact upon the projects’ effectiveness.

The two previous editions of the prize saw Water.org (now independently setup as www.mpaani.com) triumph in 2012 and in 2011, the winning team was given the opportunity to work with the US Non-profit ‘One Laptop per Child’.

Examples of the business models proposed this year include sourcing the humble cricket as a nutritious foodstuff and an enterprise allowing small food-stall vendors to pool their orders thereby enabling them to take advantage of wholesale prices to reduce their costs.

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