Ugandan to head Hult Prize Challenge at Rhodes University

Sidney Muhangi, a Ugandan student at Rhodes University has been selected as Campus Director for the Hult Prize challenge at Rhodes University in South Africa, the first of its kind at the university.

"Hult Prize is the world's largest student competition which where students tackle President Clinton's challenge to create viable start-ups and compete for $1 million in seed capital," according to a communiqué from the university.

The 2017 Hult Prize will focus Refugees - Reawakening Human Potential and Restoring the Dignity of 10M People by 2022- a challenge personally selected by President Bill Clinton as a global crisis in need of urgent attention and innovative solutions.

Ahmad Ashkar, CEO and Founder of the Hult Prize, attributes the success of the competition to the shift in the global economy and the millennial generation's refusal to live in a world with inequality.

"We are giving entrepreneurs from around the world a platform to innovate and revolutionize the way we think about servicing the disadvantaged," Ashkar said.

The winning team from the Hult Prize at Rhodes University event will be fast-tracked to compete at one of the five Hult Prize regional finals events around the world.

The Hult Prize regional competitions will take place on March 3 and 4, 2017 in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai, and Shanghai.

Following the regional finals, one winning team from each host city will attend a summer business accelerator, where participants will receive mentorship, advisory and strategic planning as they create prototypes and set-up to launch their new social business. A final round of competition will take place in September, where one team will be selected as the winner and will be awarded the US$ 1,000,000 seed capital by President Bill Clinton himself.

In the words of President Clinton, "The Hult Prize is a wonderful example of the creative cooperation needed to build a world with shared opportunity, shared responsibility, and shared prosperity, and each year I look forward to seeing the many outstanding ideas the competition produces."

About Sidney Muhangi

Muhangi is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar class of 2016 who completed his Bachelor's degree in Business Administration at Makerere University. He currently studies Management at Rhodes University in South. He is a social entrepreneur and the co-founder of UniTED, an NGO supporting University students to develop social business ideas in Uganda.