Taipei, TW: Today, National Chengchi University’s Team IMPCT proudly announces its top ten finish at this year’s Hult Prize Challenge. Among 20,000 teams from the world’s top business school, this is the highest achievement ever for a Taiwanese university competing in a global competition of this magnitude.
Team IMPCT’s Juan Diego Prudot, from Honduras, said “When we arrived nobody took us seriously. Everybody thought we were from Thailand! By the end we had people lining up for our business cards and offering their complete support in bringing our project to their country.” An-nung Chen, from Taiwan, added “We wanted to show that, even though Taiwan is a small country, it has a huge heart. We think we made Taiwan proud.”
The Hult Prize is a yearly social enterprise competition sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative that held 5 regional competitions around the world. It seeks to generate market-based solutions to the world’s most pressing social issues and grant a 1 million USD seed fund to the winning team. This year’s challenge was to provide quality early childhood education to over 10,000,000 children in urban slums by 2020. Team IMPCT won National Chengchi University’s inaugural Hult Prize competition, securing them a spot in the regional finals in Dubai. There they finished second, just narrowly missing a spot at the coveted $1,000,000 USD finals in New York.
They responded to this challenge with a unique proposal, to create a platform capable of driving a revolution through ‘impact investing’, which harnesses entrepreneurship, innovation, and capital to power social improvement. Their model is the result of consultations and partnerships with some of the world’s leading NGOs; the United Nations World Food Program, UNICEF, TECHO, FEPADE, and FUSAL.
IMPCT’s Taylor Scobbie, from Canada, describes the model as follows “Charity and micro-finance have, unfortunately, failed to live up to this challenge. We turn the existing system completely on its head by holding the enterprising people in urban slums as worth investing in. We find the best people, the best projects, and let anybody, anywhere, make real equity investments in them. The investors receive a part of the profits to reinvest in more schools; the community keeps the rest to reinvest in itself. We want to offer a real alternative to impersonal charity and show that investments can have both social and financial returns.”
IMPCT is happy to announce that they will be launching a crowdfunding campaign on the popular website Indiegogo on April 4th, children’s day in Taiwan, to raise funds to start development on their impact investment platform. Andres Escobar, from El Salvador, says “Investing in the world’s poorest is an idea whose time has come. With your help we can make it happen.”
About IMPCT: IMPCT is a non-profit social enterprise based in Taipei, Taiwan. Their mission is to provide quality education to the world’s poorest people through their innovative microequity investment platform. To know more about their journey and their upcoming crowdfunding campaign, you can visit their Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/impct or website: http://www.impct.co.
