Five students competed in the regional finals of the fourth annual Hult Prize competition in Boston March 2.
Lauren Behgam ’15, Rebecca Kagan ’13, Erin Kelley ’15, Taylor Lanzet ’15 and Gladys Ndagire ’13 tackled this year’s challenge — the global food crisis — with their business idea, CharCOOL. The project uses charcoal-based cooling units, similar to refrigerators that don’t need electricity, and works toward the goal of eliminating world hunger, Kagan said.
“About 30 percent of food is wasted in transit in developing countries because it spoils. So if you put large coolers on trucks, you reduce the amount of waste,” Kagan said. People working in urban slums will be more able to afford food because prices will drop when the quantity available in the markets increase, she added.
The Hult Prize is an annual competition co-hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative and the Hult Business School, according to a University press release. Each year the competition focuses on a pressing issue facing the world, with the hope that the Hult Prize will lead to the emergence of the next wave of social entrepreneurs, according to the Hult Prize website.
After the open application period, 250 teams were notified in January of their invitation to the March regional finals and given the global challenge their projects needed to address, Kagan said.
Former President Bill Clinton chose this year’s challenge, according to the Hult Prize website.
Each of the 250 teams competed in one of five regional competitions in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai and Shanghai March 1 and 2, according to the release. One team was then selected from each region to spend the summer in a business incubator. In September, the final five teams will compete at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting and one team will leave with a $1 million prize to pursue its project, according to the Hult Prize website.
Behgam and Kagan are co-founders of the Food Recovery Network, a national nonprofit that helps students start food rescue organizations at their universities, Behgam said. Kagan used her knowledge of running nonprofits while Behgam was responsible for synthesizing statistics about food waste in transit and in urban slums, she said.
The team behind CharCOOL did not advance beyond the regional finals in Boston, Kagan said. Students from McGill University will continue on to the summer incubator and further develop their idea of selling and eating crickets. McGill’s winning project was an idea Brown’s team also considered — two members of CharCOOL firmly believe that bugs are going to help improve food security, Kagan said.
If CharCOOL had won the competition, the project would have piloted in Uganda and expanded to reach 200 million people living in slums, Kagan said. Since Ndagire worked in Uganda for 10 years, she was responsible for figuring out the logistics of cultivating this project in the country, Kagan said. Kagan added that if her team had won or at least advanced to the summer incubator stage, they all would have moved to Uganda to build the nonprofit.
CharCOOL was one of the only undergraduate teams competing at the Boston regional finals. Most of the regional finalists came from graduate business schools, Kagan said.
“It became very apparent that our business skills were not as fine-tuned as the other finalists,” Behgam said. “I learned that it’s great to be able to think of solutions to these problems, but it’s extremely necessary to have the business skills to implement those solutions in the social enterprise field.”
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