AMMAN — A Jordanian and international student team from Al
Hussein Technical University (
HTU) has won first place in the 2021
IREX -
Global Solutions Sustainability Challenge, sponsored by the US Department of
State, with a platform that tackles the environmental and economic impacts of
food waste.
اضافة اعلان
The virtual exchange competition, which was held online, saw
the participation of 27 multi-national teams, composed of 610 students from 42
institutions across the US,
Jordan, and Iraq, according to Raed Mehyar, the
winning team’s technology specialist.
“I was over the moon. The winners’ announcement was an
astonishing moment!” Mehyar said in an interview with
Jordan News, describing
it as “a huge win.”
The rewarded project seeks to innovatively tackle “the three
pillars of sustainability: people, planet, and profit,” according to Mehyar,
meeting the requirements of the business sector.
The team, called Planeteers, successfully identified core
sustainability problems to be targeted based on real research of Jordanian and
American needs. They found that food waste has the “biggest potential,” Sanad
Al-Kiswani, a non-limited technology specialist on the team, explained to
Jordan News.
Their final project is a developed platform that helps to
curb the negative environmental and economic impacts resulting from food waste
in “a creative, efficient, and feasible way,” Kiswani said.
“Our platform, Paragon, helps food industry stakeholders
optimize the communication in the supply chain. The platform also includes
supply and demand forecasting by providing an agile, transparent way to
exchange data,” added Kiswani.
Students expressed intentions for future development, as
they aim at expanding the awarded project “to become a fully functioning
platform that can be used on a very large scale,” through creating a
functioning prototype allowing real testing, according to Kiswani.
The envisioned prototype would also be used for “finding
potential investors,” said the team’s prototype leader, Aya Mousa.
The students interviewed expressed how much they gained from
the competition, as it developed their knowledge and skills, with a focus on
entrepreneurship and actual real-life scenarios in Jordan.
“Getting this recognition provides a pathway to new
connections in this field, which is really important to us,” Mousa said.
For Mehyar, gaining “cross-cultural” knowledge and skills
was his favorite part of the remote virtual exchange. He worked with American
colleagues from Santa Fe College, alongside the 13 Jordanian members from the
Planeteers team.
Kiswani stressed that the team’s success was rooted in the
“exceptionally experienced and skilled” team members. “It was a bit stressful
at the start, but after the first week or two, we were able to organize the
different roles and tasks and create a highly productive environment for our
team!”
The challenge is funded by the Stevens Initiative, which is
sponsored by the US Department of State, with funding provided by the US
government, and is administered by the Aspen Institute. It is also supported by
the Bezos Family Foundation and the governments of Morocco and the UAE,
according to IREX’s website.
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