$500,000 grand prize awarded to developmental initiative to eradicate poverty in Singapore

SINGAPORE — On May 4, 2023, the inaugural =Dreams Asia Breakthrough Prize Award Ceremony was held at Parkroyal Collection Pickering. The first nation-wide competition offered a grand prize of $500,000 for innovative breakthrough solutions to eradicate poverty in Singapore. 

The competition started in May 2022

with 63 teams submitting new concepts for alleviating poverty in Singapore. Then, 25 teams were invited to present their ideas to a panel of judges in September last year. From there, eight teams were shortlisted and provided a seed funding of $25,000 to further develop their solutions and proof of concepts over six months, during which they dived into action research with their beneficiaries, and had access to mentors, potential funders, dialogues with policymakers and other coaching sessions.

The competition also served as a platform for raising awareness about the poverty situation in Singapore, through specialised workshops and mentorship for the contestants, and through a social media campaign for the public. 

Led by Straits Times editor-at-large Han Fook Kwang, a panel of eight judges representing philanthropists, academicians, social entrepreneurs and policymakers crowned Team Empowered Families Initiative (EFI) the grand winner of the competition for their developmental initiative that aims to “invest” in the aspirations and plans of low-income families to improve their life circumstances. 

“We looked for a breakthrough solution which will make a difference to the poverty problem. The team must have a workable plan with a realistic budget to roll out over a three-year period. The plan has to be implementable by existing organisations and Singapore Family Service Centres, social enterprises and charities. Most of all, it has to be an innovative breakthrough solution, achieving results not attainable in the current scheme of things. So I’m very happy to report that it was a near unanimous decision by the judges to put EFI at the top of the list,” said Mr Han.

Honourable mentions also went to Team Lekker Architects and Team Elevate the Streets. Team Lekker Architects aimed to increase upward-mobility among under-resourced youth in Singapore through VR technology and an immersive digital classroom which lets students create and explore worlds that they designed and made themselves, while Team Elevate the Streets aimed to create sustained street arts as a core youth engagement strategy. 

Speaking on their win, Ms Siti Adriana Muhammad Rasip, Team Leader of Team EFI, said: “It was actually so unexpected, because the other groups are all so creative with very, very innovative ideas. But we were also happy because this funding will help us to scale up and benefit more families.

“The next stage of what we want to do is to work with social service agencies. Our scaling strategy is to scale up and scale out. Scaling up is about increasing the number of beneficiaries, while scaling out is to engage through this funding. We will also be giving the funding to social service agencies to pilot EFI within their own agencies. Implementing it together will allow the community practice to learn from each other along the way, which is a shift from how we do social assistance.

“This competition made me realise there are a lot of innovative ideas to try in eradicating poverty. If it wasn’t for this competition that gave us the means to experiment with innovative ideas, we wouldn’t even have tried our idea out, even though we believed in it.”