Taipei, TAIWAN: For the first time ever, a Taiwanese team has been chosen to compete in the grand finals of the annual Clinton Global Initiative/Hult Prize Challenge. National Chengchi University’s Team IMPCT emerged as the winners of this year’s “online round” crowdfunding challenge after raising a competition record $57,000 USD. This total was significantly buoyed by front page coverage by local newspapers UEN (United Evening News) and UDN (United Daily News).  

IMPCT was founded in October 2014 by four students from NCCU’s IMBA program: Taylor Scobbie from Canada, An-Nung Chen from Taiwan, Juan Diego Prudot from Honduras, and Andres Escobar from El Salvador. They came together to compete in this year’s Hult Prize challenge, tasked with developing a sustainable solution to the problem of early education in urban slums throughout the world. Their project has since evolved in a fully-formed seed-stage business, currently seeking investment to scale across Asia and Latin America.

IMPCT is a social enterprise with a broad mission to build education businesses for the world’s poorest residents. The heart of its solution is a revolutionary purpose-built microequity platform.This platform will enable people anywhere in the world to make real investments in community-owned education businesses providing significant social and financial benefits.

IMPCT’s Taylor Scobbie describes the model: “IMPCT seeks to create an accessible, democratic, and personal impact investment platform. We want to put the power to make socially conscious investments back in the hands of the average person. Leveraging these investments to build education businesses represents a purely positive investment cycle.”

IMPCT will use 100% of the capital raised through its crowdfunding effort to establish the business and build its first two pilot schools in El Salvador and Honduras this summer. To ensure complete transparency donors will receive full updates on the construction process. Juan Diego Prudot adds “We have the foundation of the business set up, we have the capital to build our pilot schools and prove our model. The next step is to travel to Boston and refine the business at Hult’s accelerator and then win the $1,000,000 USD in New York City.”

About IMPCT’s long-term goals, An-Nung Chen explains “We want to turn the first two schools we build this summer into thousands more over the next five years. By leveraging small investments from people everywhere in the world we think we can educate millions of children in that time.”