This year’s finalists include:

🔹 Chancen International is unlocking access to higher education across Africa by removing financial barriers. Through income share agreements, students repay only when they’re earning above a living wage, with repayment calibrated to income level. More than 7,000 students financed to date, with 89% employed within a year and earning an average 3.5x over the national median.

🔹 Kybele Worldwide, working with the Ghana Health Service, introduced a low-cost triage system that enables hospitals to detect and respond rapidly to obstetric emergencies. Assessment times have dropped from over an hour to under 10 minutes, contributing to a 30% reduction in maternal mortality. The model is now expanding to other countries.

🔹 Selina Wamucii is transforming market access for Kenya’s smallholder farmers. By addressing barriers like quality control, logistics, and aggregation—and connecting farmers to global demand—the platform now serves 1M+ farmers, increasing incomes by an average of 60%.

🔹 Teach the World Foundation is rethinking how education reaches out-of-school children. Its solar-powered “digital microschools” deliver foundational skills in just a couple hours a day—no certified teachers required on-site. In a 100-school pilot in Pakistan, attendance neared 90% and students achieved learning gains 2.5x faster than through traditional models.

The F. M. Kirby Prize for Scaling Impact is an annual global prize of USD $150,000 in unrestricted funds that amplifies and accelerates the work of an enterprise working to scale its impact on social or environmental problems around the world. Now in its fifth year, this program is administered by the Center for Advancement of Social Enterprise (CASE) at Duke Univesity’s Fuqua School of Business in partnership with the F. M. Kirby Foundation.

The F. M. Kirby Foundation and the Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business selected Solar Freeze as the winner of the 2024-2025 F. M. Kirby Prize for Scaling Impact.

Solar Freeze is a Kenya-based social enterprise tackling post-harvest loss and energy poverty through an innovative, climate-smart solution: mobile, solar-powered cold storage units for smallholder farmers. By offering affordable, off-grid refrigeration, Solar Freeze is helping to extend the shelf life of crops, increase farmers’ incomes, and reduce food waste. The model is both environmentally sustainable and economically inclusive, enabling farmers — especially women and youth — to access essential infrastructure via a pay-as-you-store system. With its scalable technology and community-centered approach, Solar Freeze is transforming agricultural livelihoods across sub-Saharan Africa.

The prize, consisting of $150,000 in unrestricted funds, is designed to help amplify and accelerate an enterprise’s impact on social or environmental problems around the world. In the 2024-25 application year, four finalists were chosen from more than 200 applicants. The four finalists represent a mix of nonprofit and for-profit enterprises working in Colombia, Eastern Africa, and across the world. Their innovative solutions span impact areas including economic development, affordable treatments for a common birth defect, and scalable sanitation infrastructure.

Read more about the three other finalists: Global Fund for Widows, MiracleFeet, Trofica