LONDON — Around the globe, various schools are raising awareness, money and ideas in order to alleviate global poverty. At London Imperial College, four groups of students have joined together to come up with new entrepreneurship ideas for a solution.
The College’s Business School partnered with Global Action on Poverty (GAP) to form a competition for students. GAP is a global platform that focuses on generating new ideas for alleviating poverty.
The group’s focus is to find individuals that want to create change. “To us, Changemakers are the ones who have an idea or are already working on initiatives to eradicate poverty in their own community or region,” their website states. “They are deeply committed and have either begun their change-making journey or are scaling their initiatives to impact other regions/geographies.”
Students in the competition pitched their entrepreneurial ideas on how to eradicate poverty in the world to a panel of judges from Global Action on Poverty and the Business School, according to the London Imperial College website.
Eight months after the start of the campaign, four finalists were selected. Each group will have the opportunity to attend a large entrepreneurship event in February.
“During this event the students will get to meet other social entrepreneurs from all over the world and take part in workshops and one-to-one interactions with mentors and catalysts—entrepreneurs from companies who are looking to facilitate social change in business or technology,” states the school’s website.
Each of the winners had a wide range of solutions: creating rural entrepreneurs, assisting African farmers, producing clean electricity and providing clothing.
Raahat was a project proposal that aimed its alleviation aspects towards rural communities of India. The goal of the project is to “empower people with the practical skills needed to increase their income.” With a focus on helping individuals develop goods that could be sold online, the hope is to bridge the gap between skills and knowledge.
Kappasc was another winning project. The target area of this business idea centers on a database app to improve sales and purchases of African farmers. “The project aims to help the farmers achieve a fairer price for their products at wholesale and ensure that customers get better value for their goods.”
PhD London Imperial College student, Clementine Chambon, came up with the Oorja project, which aims to “build and install decentralized, easy to operate plants to co-produce clean electricity.” Micro-entrepreneurs and women’s self-help groups would manage the project.
The last project to reach the final stages focuses on the need for clothing. With a mobile and web platform connecting NGOs, volunteers and donors, the goal is to keep an efficient track of clothing collections and distributions. In this way, Need for Clothing is aiming to improve deprived communities of India.
“It was fantastic to hear about ideas which could provide the solution to eliminating poverty by empowering communities and generating social and economic wellbeing,” stated Manisha Dahad, the individual responsible for Partnership Engagement at Global Action on Poverty.
Sources: Imperial College London 1, Global Action Poverty, Imperial College London 2
Photo: Imperial College London