Six Lebanese Youth Start-ups Qualify for Hult Prize Final Competition

Beirut, 15 May 2018 (United Nations Information Centre) — Hult Prize Foundation has concluded the semi-final round of its international competition, “Hult Prize Lebanon National Competition,” launched for the first time in Lebanon at the beginning of this academic year. The competition is held in partnership with the Central Bank of Lebanon and BLOM bank and in cooperation with the United Nations Information Centre in Beirut (UNIC Beirut).

The competition ran under the title “Harnessing the Power of Energy to Transform the lives of 10 million people”, and six finalists qualified for the final round:

1. Pro Shield (American University of Beirut): Haytham Dbouk, Razan Badran, Jaafar Sharafeddine, Rasha Moussawi.
2. YallaBus (American University of Beirut): Georges Geha, Ghassan Zugheib, Yara Nassar, Therese Keyrouz.
3. Bright steps (Beirut Arab University): Manal Jaber, Jihan Ghanem, Suzana Ghannam.
4. Transformer (Beirut Arab University): Ali Saleh, Sarah Zallaya, Hussein Kanson, Mohammad Bdeir.
5. H^2 (Lebanese American University): Hussein Kazem, Hadi Saade.
6. Energy Saving Mode On (Rafic Hariri University): Adam Choufi, Jawad Haidar, Rabab Kawtharani, Rawan Ghalayini.

Students participating in the competition received training for around 7 months, and 50 teams qualified for the semi-finals, including around 150 students. The aim of this competition is to encourage young people to innovate and create social enterprises that promote optimal use of energy for a development issue.

The teams will compete in the final round in September for a chance to win US$250,000 to establish their start-up, and to qualify for the global finals, where the world’s top six student startups will pitch for US$1,000,000 at the United Nations HQ in New York.

Hult Prize Foundation is the World’s Largest accelerator for youth-driven innovation and entrepreneurship, creating and funding game-changing startups every year. It was founded in 2009 by Palestinian American Ahmad Ashkar and has been called the “Nobel Prize for Students.” Led by its CEO and a team of 2500 staff and volunteers across the world and a student-workforce of more than 25,000 people, Hult has invested over US$50,000,000 in the development of the social enterprise sector, including an annual startup prize of US$1,000,000.