Having qualified from more than 70,500 university students from more than 1,750 campuses, 36 national teams earned the honour of representing their country at the Enactus World Cup. Following the closely contested semi-final round, four university teams advanced to the final round with the team from the University of Southampton, representing the United Kingdom, announced as the 2015 Enactus World Champion on Friday 16 October.
Present and future world leaders met last week at the Enactus World Cup to showcase entrepreneurial excellence and shared innovation to transform lives and create a better more sustainable world over three unforgettable days of competition, collaboration and celebration at the Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, South Africa.
The Enactus team from the United Kingdom was represented at the 2015 Enactus World Cup by the University of Southampton, who presented their projects focused on addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a special focus on empowerment of entrepreneurs, sanitation, water security and education in Kenya. These are sustainable projects, which can be transferred to other regions, providing long-term solutions to global challenges reflecting the team’s commitment to the objectives of the Enactus programme. A significant achievement of the UK team was their aim for their enterprises to be fully self-sustainable within the next year.
The Enactus team from the University of Southampton delivered significant growth and impact over the past year, with the result of a large team which, through team members studying 30 different degree subjects, were able to develop fourteen different projects, all aligned to their team’s goals of education, equality and empowerment as part of their 2020 vision to positively impact 360,000 people.
The magnitude and reach of the powerful and global Enactus organisation, which empowers lives, continues to increase with the journey continuing next year at the 2016 Enactus World Cup, to be held in Toronto, Canada from 28th – 30th September 2016. Team United Kingdom’s win this year is a fitting precursor to the 2017 Enactus World Cup, which will be hosted in London.
The high calibre of entrepreneurial projects for social impact presented at the Enactus World Cup have been remarkable with over 2 million people impacted over the past year through the global non-profit Enactus, this is set to continue to increase through the energy created during the Enactus World Cup, igniting personal transformation and resulting in community projects that become long-term social enterprises with impact.
Future Foundations is a proud supporting partner of Enactus UK, and is excited to share this incredible news and global recognition for the work done by Enactus students across the UK to create positive social change. Our history of collaboration goes back to 2007.
Our CEO, Jon Harper, was the first UK Programme Director who led the UK programme from 2003 to 2007, before joining Future Foundations. Since then we have employed over 50 Enactus students and successfully bid in partnership with Enactus UK to government to deliver the National Citizen Service in 9 cities across the country.
