The 2022 Zayed Sustainability Prize has been awarded to 10 winners who have contributed towards achieving sustainable development in their communities.
The award ceremony coincided with the start of the 2022 Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week (ADSW) on Monday.
Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who gave away the prizes at the Dubai Exhibition Centre, congratulated winners across the five categories.
The event brought thousands of attendees and more than 600 VIPs from around the world together, including heads of state, government ministers, industry leaders and country ambassadors, amongst others.
Sheikh Mohammed said the UAE continues to make important strides and contributions to advancing the global sustainability agenda to stimulate economic and human sustainable development.
“The Zayed Sustainability Prize remains at the forefront of these efforts as it continues to set the course for alleviating hardships and improving lives by rewarding impact and innovation through a platform that can reach a much larger number of beneficiaries,” he said.
The $3 million prize is the UAE’s pioneering sustainability award that recognizes small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), non-profit organizations (NPOs), and global high schools for their innovative, impactful, and inspirational sustainability and humanitarian solutions.
Through its 86 former winners, the Prize has transformed the lives of more than 370 million people, across 150 countries, since 2008.
In the Health, Food, Energy, and Water categories, each winner receives $600,000, while the Global High Schools category has six winners, representing six world regions, with each winner receiving up to $100,000, the organizers said in a statement.
In the ‘Health’ Category, Argentina’s Mamotest was awarded the Prize for its efforts to increase access to diagnoses and life-saving services in tele-radiology and remote analysis.
Mamotest is currently deploying centers that are providing 582,697 beneficiaries affected by breast cancer access to quality healthcare, with plans to scale this to over 1 million people over a period of five years.
Mamotest also enjoys robust patient-journey follow-up as 87 percent of women diagnosed within their system could receive lifesaving treatment on time.
Furthermore, Mamotest has successfully carried out more than 5,000 diagnoses to date while creating awareness in millions of women.
S4S Technologies from India was the ‘Food’ category winner for its important work in food preservation and dehydration systems. They currently directly impact 35,820 people and the SME plans to scale this to 10 million individuals over the course of five years.
In the Energy category, the Bangladesh-based SOLshare created an interconnected microgrid for peer-to-peer energy exchange networks to enable more efficient distribution of electricity across rural communities in the country.
The organization won the 2022 award for its efforts in energy management as it currently benefits a total of 35, 300 people with plans to expand its reach to 2 million people in the next five years.
SOLshare is providing more than 1,000 households with access to over 85 MWh of additional clean energy and serves approximately 500 entrepreneurs within their grids, of which 25 percent are women who experience significant income rises as a result.
Wateroam, an SME from Singapore, secured the ‘Water’ category win for its commitment to tackling the global challenge of contaminated water through portable water filters to serve disaster-hit and rural communities.
Wateraom’s safe drinking water solutions are benefitting more than 150,000 people across 38 countries globally with daily access to clean drinking water and has plans to expand its reach to 1 million people over a period of five years.
The Chair of the Jury and former President of the Republic of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, said: “The level of creativity, vision and potential scale outlined by this year’s winners has been truly remarkable and uplifting as the sustainability world looks to the future through a more challenging, yet determined prism.”
Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and Director General of the Zayed Sustainability Prize said: “Following the guidance of the UAE’s wise leadership and the enduring legacy of the late Sheikh Zayed, the Prize continues to deliver real, meaningful, and long-term impact to numerous communities around the world. This has earned the Prize a global reputation as a catalyst for change for over a decade, as it has to date benefited the lives of more than 370 million people.”
In the Global High Schools category, six schools, each representing a world region, receive an award and high schools submit project proposals to build or augment a solution they developed for their school or local community. The objective of this category, introduced to the Prize in 2012, is to inspire the young people to become pioneers, innovators and sustainability advocates who will contribute to a more sustainable future.
The recipients of the 2022 awards are Instituto Iberia (Dominican Republic), representing The Americas; Liceo Europeo (Spain), representing Europe & Central Asia; Eastern Mediterranean School (Israel), representing the Middle East & North Africa region; Sayidina Abubakar Secondary School (Uganda), representing Sub-Saharan Africa; Hira School (Maldives), representing South Asia, and finally, UWC ISAK (Japan) from the East Asia & Pacific region.