Zayed Sustainability $3M Prize Now Open for African Applicants

Now in its 9th year, the Zayed Sustainability Prize has opened applications for African Entrepreneurs. The Prize serves as a tribute to the late founding father of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who was a visionary champion of environmental stewardship and global sustainability. This yearly award celebrates achievements that are impact driven, inspiring, and innovative across five distinct categories: Health, Food, Energy, Water and Global High Schools. This annual award is similar to the Nobel awards which give out prize money to outstanding achievement in some specified field of endeavour.

The prize money has been given out annually since the year 2009 with winners from different parts of the world and this what you have to bring to the table in order to bag a prize in the earlier mentioned categories;

Health: you empower people by giving them access to affordable healthcare. Your organisation is active in improving maternal and newborn health, tackling epidemics and illness from pollution and hazardous chemicals and providing access to basic and affordable healthcare.

Food: you empower people by giving them access to safe and affordable food. Your organisation is taking an active part in ending hunger and malnutrition, ensuring sustainable food production systems, increasing agricultural productivity and promoting seed type and animal population diversity.

Energy: you empower people by providing access to energy and energy efficiency solutions.

Water: you empower people by providing access to safe and affordable drinking water. Your organisation is active in improving water quality, sanitation, water use efficiency, protection of water-related ecosystems and community participation.

Global High Schools: Schools must propose projects that can be implemented within 12-24 months with tangible outcomes in the areas of sustainable energy, water, food and health. The projects need to be designed to deliver positive educational impact including access to quality education and ensure that students are given key skills and enhanced abilities to achieve their goals. Ideally, projects should demonstrate new and innovative approaches and be inspirational for others. One school will win in each of the six regions. For more.

Eligibility

To be eligible for all the categories above, you should:

• Be an SME, social enterprise, non-governmental organisation (NGO), non-profit organisation (NPO) or a similar organisation.
• Have a yearly revenue of at least $50 million
• Have a clear vision and long-term plan to further deploy your solution and scale up your impact and inspire others to follow suit by furthering that technology or solution.

Evaluation Criteria

The innovation criterion will require organisations to:

• – Demonstrate that their solution has unique and distinctive characteristics compared to their competitors
• – Have a level of maturity by being demonstrated on the ground
• – Have already shown characteristics to change the ‘status quo’ and have the potential to catalyse opportunities not previously considered through disruptive or transformative change.

How to apply

To submit your entry for Zayed sustainability prize, head to the website. Deadline for submission is August 9, 2018.