Jain was voted the winner in global poll.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW YORK: Northwestern University environmental engineering graduate Anoop Jain, who went back to India and started Humanure Power (HP), an organization that provides community sanitation facilities in Bihar, was voted the winner of the 2014 Waislitz Global Citizen Award that comes with a $100,000 cash prize.
Jain was recognized for his “exemplified values of a Global Citizen” and making the “world a better place†through his work in founding HP since 2011, at a ceremony here last month. HP has served more than 17,000 users, while hygienically disposing of eight tons of human excreta, since its inception.
“Ending extreme poverty is not a choice it’s an obligation. Although there can only be one winner of this award each year, my hope is that it will inspire many thousands of people like Anoop Jain around the world to do what they can to improve the living standards of those in dire need,” Chairman and Founder of the Melbourne-based Waislitz Foundation Alex Waislitz said in a statement.
Jain’s company would use the $100,000 to advance its mission of improving access to toilets for thousands of people living in Bihar and elsewhere in rural India by building more community sanitation facilities. In addition, the money would go towards formalizing their monitoring and evaluation methods.
Earlier, utilizing a $30,000 award won in Dell’s Social Innovation Challenge in 2012, HP built community blocks of toilets that convert human waste into energy, charging 12-volt batteries for household use.
Jain was among the four finalists for the award, which is based on individual merit in four key areas of global citizenship, impact, innovation, and potential. He was chosen the winner after getting the maximum votes by people from across the world.
Another Indian, Swapnil Chaturvedi, who founded ‘Samagra Sanitation’, which is focused on providing “awesome sanitation services to the urban poor” in India, also made the cut of four finalists. Since March 2013, ‘Samagra’ is implementing its sanitation engagement platform called ‘Loo Rewards’ in two urban slums of Pune.
The other two finalists were David Auerbach, the co-founder of ‘Sanergy’ which builds low-cost, high-quality sanitation facilities, and Nargis Shirazi, founder of the Wo-man Foundation, which works towards improving sexual, reproductive health and rights of women in her home country Uganda.