Ivey Business School HULT UK Competition Team
The Hult Prize is the world's largest social enterprise competition aimed at solving the world's most pressing problems. This year's challenge, issued by Bill Clinton, was to double the income of 10 million people by 2022.
The Ivey MBA team consisting of Owen Chung, Cynthia Innes, Swati Matta and Fahad Tariq, worked on a solution for six months, and in March 2016 flew to London, UK where they presented a revolutionary idea to meet this challenge: Improve income potential by eliminating poor sanitation, by turning human waste into energy.
More than one billion city-dwellers today have their economic inclusion crippled by lack of in-home toilet. Without a toilet at home, men, women and children are forced to use crowded public latrines or to defecate in the open. As a result, wide-spread waterborne illness impairs income potential. Sickness in the family limits working days, poor health reduces productivity, and healthcare expenses cut into income.
The Ivey students developed SHIFT, a social enterprise, to address this problem. SHIFT, is designing and implementing a system that empowers those most afflicted by poor sanitation to convert human waste into a valued energy outputs through biodigestion.
SHIFT provides the equipment, training, and market demand for this system to work. Local waste-to-wealth agents install SHIFT toilets— toilets that function without sewage or water connections, are odor-free, portable and can tuck away into the corner of a home. Contents of these toilets are sealed in cartridges, collected and biodigested to transform into biogas and fertilizer, which SHIFT brings to market, generating profits to fuel the entire system.
Profits are shared with waste-to-wealth agents, which effectively doubles daily income.
SHIFT has established a robust team of partners with world class experience and passion to help us validate our system and to provide valuable insights for implementation in India:
- Design Museum Dharavi is supporting our design and manufacture of toilets
- Indian Biogas Association is providing training and government access
- Green Brick Eco Solutions is renting us biodigesters
- The world’s leading UN expert on converting human waste to energy will continue to provide us with invaluable insights.
Well equipped with our research and Ivey classroom experience, we were able to answer judges’ questions thoughtfully and defended our business confidently. Our work paid off: we were introduced into the top six finalists from over fifty teams with the announcement: "This team impressed the judges with their extensive knowledge of the topic and their partners on the ground. This team succeeded in making human waste sexy. Ivey Business School."
We were honoured to represent both Ivey and Canada on the global stage. The positive feedback from judges and other students was very encouraging, and has propelled us further towards launching our social enterprise this year.
On behalf of the entire team, thank you to RBC for your support.