About us

The Earth Prize is an environmental sustainability competition open to teenage students everywhere.

Every participant in The Earth Prize will engage with original bespoke materials and get personalized mentorship from university students. They will also have the opportunity to interact with our world-renowned Ambassadors and showcase their solutions to a global audience.

The winning solution will have real-world impact potential, and the winning team will receive $100,000 (from a $200,000 total prize), to be split between their school and the team members.

THE EARTH
FOUNDATION

Inspire. Educate. Mentor. Empower.

The Earth Foundation was founded in 2020 in Geneva, Switzerland, to inspire, educate, mentor, and empower students, schools, researchers, and young entrepreneurs with innovative ideas to tackle environmental challenges. Through its initiatives The Earth Foundation strives to build its very own ecosystem.

www.earth-foundation.org

The Ecosystem

Channeling youth enthusiasm. Supporting schools. Promoting research. Empowering change-makers. Creating opportunities. Building a network of inspiration. All to create a self-perpetuating ecosystem that accelerates positive change towards environmental sustainability.

The Youth Board

Zlata Shama

2024 Youth Board member

Zlata Shama is a 14-year-old student at the International School of Geneva. She has always loved being involved in global issues in particular sustainability, equity and social interaction, she has shown that throughout multiple school initiatives such as student council and 9innovate project. Since June 2022, she is a Villars Institute Fellow an solution-oriented nonprofit foundation to accelerate the transition to net zero economy. Zlata is following the Villars Institute & Minerva Project: Systems Leadership Program. During the summer 2023, she was nominated to be a Youth Jury at the FIFAD film festival 2023. Outside, she is also a dancer at national level.

Dashel Myers

2024 Youth Board member

Dashel Myers, a junior at Fieldston School in the Bronx, has co-authored a computational mathematics textbook using Mathematica. He's the Ambassador for Wolfram Research and a leading member of the National STEM Honor Society's advisory council, focusing on SEO. As an entrepreneur, he established an AI firm merging SIEM system functionalities with natural language processing. Actively involved in New York political campaigns, Dashel supports climate-centric candidates and co-created the Organizing Resource Library (ORL) with NYU to aid disenfranchised communities. He aims to study the metamathematics of macromolecule evolution in the future.

Carlota Ferro

2023 Youth Board member

Carlota is a 17-year-old student at Collège du Léman (CDL) International School, Switzerland who is originally from Lisbon but currently resides in Geneva. She has always been passionate about international issues, specifically inequality, discrimination and sustainability. She is currently the president of a student group at CDL which fundraises for WATU, a charity with various education projects in Tanzania. She coordinates the group’s efforts and organizes multiple fundraisers for WATU each year. She is also the president of the CDL Environmental Association, through which she leads students in creating projects that attempt to make her school more sustainable. In June of 2022, she attended the Villars Symposium, where she began working with other students, teachers, and Norwegian food activist Gunhild Stordalen to create an initiative to push for increased use of planetary health diets in schools. She plans to move to London next year to continue her studies in politics, international relations, and social sciences at university.

Aarna Wadhawan

2023 - 2024 Youth Board member

Aarna Wadhawan is a 14-year-old Indian student. She is a young environmentalist and is working passionately for the causes of afforestation, air, water and soil Pollution along with girl child education. Planting over 7500 trees in India and across the world, Aarna is a 2x TEDx speaker, Josh Talks speaker and has been associated with major organisations such as WWF India, TERI, Global Resilience Partnership, Girl Up Bani among others. She is the youth ambassador of Project 100 and an awardee of the Bharat Youth Awards 2022 (India). Having worked with various NGO’s such as Princess Diya Kumari Foundation, World Environment Council, Project 100, Mobius Foundation and more, she was also an Earth Prize Scholar 2022 for her creation Ecosteria, the Solar Powered UV Lamp which aims to provide sterilization to rural areas where there is a lack of supply of electricity. She was appreciated by the Environment Minister of India for her efforts. Moving ahead, she wants to motivate and inspire young adults like herself to adopt sustainable and environmentally friendly practices to create change in mindsets around the world.

Matteo Markel

2022 - 2023 Youth Board member

Matteo Markel is a 16 year old student at the International School of Zug and Luzern in Switzerland. From a young age, he was interested in science and solving environmental issues using technology. He is passionate about carbon reduction and the sustainable systems shaping the future. Matteo worked on the Aquaponics System at ISZL, a project where waste from a fish tank is recirculated to plants which grow and clean the water for the fish. In 2020, he won a grant from the IB and the change-maker association Ashoka. Currently, he is committed to helping ISZL achieve their goal of carbon neutrality by 2027. Looking ahead, Matteo plans to take science courses about ways to balance economic growth with positive social and environmental goals.

Sagarika Sriram

2022 - 2024 Youth Board member

Sagarika Sriram is the 16 year old Founder/CEO of Kids4abetterworld, established in Dubai in 2017. She used her knowledge of Coding and Web development to create an innovative ”Kids for Kids” technology platform that helps young children to drive sustainability projects in their communities. K4Bworld conducts awareness workshops on sustainability, recycling and waste management, beach and desert clean-ups, and projects related to marine conservation. It aims to educate, motivate and activate children to conserve natural resources and biodiversity. With close to 100,000 visitors to its platform and growing media presence, Kids4aBetterWorld is also a member of UNESCO and CRI #LearningPlanet.

Lesein Mutunkei

2022 - 2024 Youth Board member

Lesein Mutunkei is a 16 year old Kenyan high school student and an avid football player. Lesein heard about deforestation and climate change when he was 12 years old. Inspired by Prof Wangari Maathai, Lesein combined his love for football and nature by committing to plant one tree for every goal he scored for his innovative initiative “Trees For Goals”. Currently, he plants 11 trees for every goal to represent his entire team. Over the last two years, Lesein has planted over 2000 trees including 700 trees at Karura Forest with the help of his football team at Ligi Ndogo.

Erina Wanzul

2023 - 2024 Youth Board member

Erina is a 17-year-old Malaysian student attending SMK Seksyen 9 Shah Alam Selangor. She is deeply committed to promoting economic growth and development through innovation in order to reduce negative externalities in STEM. She has been involved in F1 in Schools since three years, leading two F1 in Schools teams, Keris Racing and ECOLEST9, to victory in the Malaysia F1 in Schools National Finals in 2020 and 2021 as project manager and manufacturing engineer for both teams, and qualifying as a World Finalist in 2021 and 2022. Her team entered their team brand ECOLEST9 at the recent F1 in Schools World Finals, Silverstone, United Kingdom project. They managed to win two awards: the best pit display award and the best team identity award.

José Adolfo Quisocala

2022 - 2024 Youth Board member

José Adolfo Quisocala is a 17 year old Peruvian student. At the age of 7, he noticed the social and economic problems facing children in his country, as he witnessed them working to earn money instead of studying. José was also concerned about the environmental problems caused by solid waste. In 2012, he founded the first Eco Bank in the world for children, “Banco del Estudiante Bastselena”. By recycling plastic and paper waste generated at their homes and schools, the children earn money in their bank accounts to pay for food and education. José’s initiative won UNICEF’s Child and Youth Finance International Award in 2014 and the Children’s Climate Prize in 2018.

Kareena Shah

2023 - 2024 Youth Board member

Kareena Shah is a 17-year-old innovator based in the U.S who is a student at The Knowledge Society. She started a World Water Crisis Awareness Campaign highlighting the water accessibility and safety crises. Her travels to Haryana, India enabled her to work hands-on in marginalized communities by testing for microbial contamination in drinking water. To globalize her vision, she created One Drop at A Time, a podcast which unravels the contributing factors to this acute crisis. She hopes to empower individuals to advocate for changes within their own communities to preserve our Earth’s most important natural resource.

Georgia Scarr

2022 Youth Board member

Georgia Scarr is a 17 year old IB student, born in London and raised in Chicago. An environmentalist and humanitarian at her core, Georgia is a passionate activist. She works in several environmental organizations, including being co-founder and co-executive director of the non-profit Eco Circle International, and a core team member of non-profit Illinois Youth Climate Movement. She plans to study Environmental Science at university, with hopes to travel the world in a van afterwards, engaging communities through science to make the world more sustainable. In her free time, Georgia enjoys hiking and camping.

Maria Šimůnková

2022 Youth Board member

Maria Šimůnková is an 18 year old student from the Czech Republic interested in Artificial Intelligence and education. At the age of 16, Maria developed a chatbot for General Practitioners. To learn more about AI, Maria completed an internship at the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she worked on a neural network program for biomedical image segmentation. Currently, Maria is leading an educational non-profit organization focused on educating young people on how to manage their finances.

Saoirse Exton

2022 Youth Board member

Saoirse Exton began her work as a climate activist at the age of 13 in Limerick, Ireland when she founded the local branch of the Fridays for Future movement in her city. Saoirse is a member of the C40 Global Youth and Mayors Forum, which creates an intergenerational conversation on the climate crisis among 14 youth activists from across the world and mayors of the world's mega-cities. She is currently serving her second term as Equality Officer of the Irish Second-Level Students' Union, which enables her to bring student voices to the forefront of decision-making in Ireland.

Vinisha Umashankar

2022 Youth Board member

Vinisha Umashankar is a 15 year old student, an innovator and a public speaker. She lives in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, India. She started her innovation journey when she was 12 years old. Videos about her innovation, the Solar Ironing Cart, have been seen over 10 million times with 70,000+ comments. She focuses on innovations that help the less-privileged make their lives more comfortable. Her innovations have won national and international awards. She is the recipient of Earth Day Network "Rising Star" 2021 (USA), Children's Climate Prize 2020 (Sweden) and Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam IGNITE Award 2019 (India).

The Earth Prize Ambassadors

The Earth Prize Ambassadors are inspiring individuals with a strong passion for environmental sustainability, eager to spread the word about The Earth Foundation initiatives. These Ambassadors will also provide The Earth Prize Finalist teams with advice and guidance ahead of their presentation to the Adjudicating Panel.

Discover The Earth Prize Ambassadors

The Adjudicating Panel

Karen Wilson

Chair of the Panel

Karen Wilson is the Founder of GV Partners and an expert on innovation, entrepreneurship, finance, sustainability and impact measurement, working with private sector firms, international organizations, foundations and academia. She is an Associate Fellow at Said Business School at Oxford University and a Senior Advisor on Sustainability and ESG at the Institute for Strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, where she is also a Visiting Lecturer. She has a Bachelors of Science from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Steven Monfort

Member of the Panel

Steve Monfort is the Executive Director of the University of California's Natural Reserve System. He is also the former director of the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and currently serves as a senior advisor to the Smithsonian's Under Secretary for Science and Research. As a pioneer in the field of Conservation Biology, Dr. Monfort is a subject matter expert in Zoo Biology, Animal Health, Reproductive Biology, and Behavioral Ecology. Over the course of his 33-year career at the Smithsonian, he has led scientists on the cutting-edge of saving species, from developing non-invasive endocrine monitoring techniques to reintroducing the previously-extinct Scimitar-horned Oryx back into the wild. More recently, he has led the Smithsonian in adopting a “solutions-based mindset,” focusing on what is working in conservation and how we can do more of it.

Thakur S. Powdyel

Member of the Panel

Professor Thakur S. Powdyel is an educator by choice, conviction and passion with particular interest in Education as the Noble Sector, Gross National Happiness, and Ethical Literacy. As the former Minister of Education, Gusi Peace Laureate Powdyel, often referred to as the most widely foot-travelled education minister in the world, moved Bhutan towards fulfilling the MDGs and Constitutional mandate for education. Powdyel’s little book My Green School has been translated into some 14 major languages around the world, with other translations underway. He has been a Visiting Professor and member of international panels and advisory boards.

Kisum Chan

Member of the Panel

Kisum is a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur and co-founder of Rice Inc, an agtech startup that develops tech-based solutions to fight the production waste occurring in the rice industry.

Rice Inc was founded in 2018 during Kisum’s time at the University College London (UCL). Since then Rice Inc has been recognised as a leading social enterprise that’s changing the world by winning several accolades. In particular Rice Inc has won the prestigious $1 million Hult Prize in 2018 and has been featured in leading news outlets including the BBC, Business Insider and Forbes.

Esther Ndeti

Member of the Panel

Esther Ndeti is Investment Principal at Uncap.

With over a decade of experience, she has built a deep understanding of investment strategy in the venture funding space as well as tactical experience in early-stage financing. Her areas of focus have included strategic analysis, due diligence assessment, capital-raising advisory and portfolio management. She is also an advocate for women in business and recently founded ‘Preneur Today’, an initiative that spotlights the work of female entrepreneurs in Africa.

In her previous role, Esther was Executive Director of the East African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (EAVCA), where she worked at the intersection of finance and private sector development; supporting institutional investors and regulators through market analysis, strategy development, policy formulation and fundraising. Esther has also served on the Board of Directors of Victoria Business Angels (VBAN), GrowthAfrica and ASSEK.

Esther received her Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nairobi.

Mentors

The Earth Prize Mentors are university students who are passionate about sustainability and entrepreneurship and looking for an opportunity to share their knowledge. Mentors will contribute to the development of students’ innovative project proposals by offering them guidance on their ideas and answering their questions. The Earth Prize 2023 will now recognize three mentors with The Earth Prize Mentor of the Year award. The three best mentors, as voted by the competition’s Participants, will receive a $5,000 prize each.

Discover The Earth Prize Mentors

The Team

Angela McCarthy, CEO

Anett Thomson, Head of Strategy & Partnerships

Diana Conde Moure, Head of Communications & Operations

Get Involved

The Earth Prize is always looking for volunteers passionate about environmental sustainability to help us empower young talents around the world and to drive positive impact.

Discover The Earth Prize Volunteer Community

‘’The Earth Prize is a great opportunity for young people to collect brilliant thoughts and put them forward.‘’

Ram Chandra Dahal
Teacher at The Royal Academy

Contact us

Rue Muzy 8
1207 Geneva
Switzerland

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About us

THE EARTH FOUNDATION

Inspire. Educate. Mentor. Empower.

www.earth-foundation.org

The Ecosystem

The Youth Board

Zlata Shama

2024 Youth Board member

The Earth Prize Ambassadors

Discover The Earth Prize Ambassadors

The Adjudicating Panel

Karen Wilson

Chair of the Panel

Mentors

The Team

Get Involved

Discover The Earth Prize Volunteer Community

Contact us

THIS WEBSITE USES COOKIES

THE EARTH
FOUNDATION