Student team from the Rutgers Business School wins the Hult Prize, which comes with a $1 million gift.
A team of students from Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick won the $1 million Hult Prize for designing and building a rickshaw transportation system to improve the lives of refugees in South Asia. The start-up business—Roshni Rides—is the creation of senior Gia Farooqi, Hasan Usmani RBS’17, Moneeb Mian RBS’17, and Hanaa Lakhani RBS’16. They responded a year ago to the 2017 Hult Prize Challenge, which was themed “Reawakening Human Potential,” by developing a business, they argued persuasively to the judges, that would restore the dignity of one million refugees by 2022. Former president Bill Clinton announced the winning team at a United Nations ceremony on September 16, praising Roshni Rides for finding a way to optimize rickshaws as reliable transportation while also making them affordable by using a preloaded transaction card and encouraging ride-sharing and use of existing rickshaw drivers. The Rutgers team was one of six finalists that had beaten 50,000 participants from 100 nations.
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