Many design competitions pad the resume of designers or stroke the egos of manufacturers, but the Wege Prize creates ideas that might change the world.
The Wege Prize — an annual international competition run out of Ferris State University’s Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids — asks university students from around the globe to solve the planet’s most stubborn problems like hunger, pollution, waste and inequality.
The Wege Prize is named after the late Peter M. Wege, a philanthropist, environmental visionary and former chairman of Steelcase. As the founder of The Wege Foundation, he championed “economicology,” — the balance between a healthy ecology and a profitable economy — which drives the prize’s focus on sustainable, circular solutions.
This year, five finalist teams have emerged from an initial field of 87 groups, and for the first time in the competition’s history, every single finalist team hails from Africa.
Africa is in the middle of a circular economy revolution that most of the Western world hasn’t noticed yet. The continent’s waste management market was valued at $21.7 billion in 2025 and is growing at roughly 5% a year. Entrepreneurs across Africa are turning plastics, organic waste, and e-waste into value streams that are generating jobs, cutting emissions and building supply chains that actually make sense for the communities they serve.
The five Wege Prize finalist teams are a perfect expression of that spirit.
Consider Egret Pads, a team turning banana crop waste — material that would otherwise be discarded — into affordable, biodegradable sanitary pads for women in Rwanda’s low-resource communities. The product takes something worthless, makes it useful, serves women who have historically been underserved, supports local farmers and when the pads are used and returns them to the soil as fertilizer. That’s a circular economy in its purest form: nothing wasted, everything valued.
Or look at Nutri-Más, which is blending whey, the stuff dairy producers typically dump — often contaminating local water sources in the process — with sorghum, maize and groundnuts to create a nutrient-dense flour for children facing malnutrition in South Sudan. They looked at a waste product that was actively causing harm and turned it into something that feeds hungry kids.
Then there’s UniThread EcoHusk, which is reimagining discarded cocoa husks — husks that degrade soil and harbor pests when left to rot — as raw materials for purification kits that can keep 95% of textile dye pollution out of waterways. Ecoscrubber is building a hybrid emissions control and carbon-capture system for incinerators that transforms toxic residues into construction materials. And Agri Nova is developing modular farming units that allow for year-round harvesting of edible grasshoppers, an increasingly vital protein source in food-insecure regions.
The competing teams spend nine months doing real research, real market analysis, real prototyping and testing with input from expert judges along the way. By the time they reach the finals, what started as an informal proposal has become a robust, feasible solution that can actually be deployed in the real world after the competition ends.
“These teams from Africa are showing the world the power of true interdisciplinary collaboration and design thinking to address the world’s wicked problems,” said Gayle DeBruyn, the Kendall professor who leads the competition. She also notes the “passion, commitment, and collective spirit of young African entrepreneurs who have cultivated a mindset of cooperative disruption and changemaking.”
It is an exercise in cooperative disruption. The idea that you can work together, across disciplines and cultures and institutions, and build something better.
The five finalists will present their solutions publicly for the first time at the 2026 Wege Prize Awards on Friday, May 15, at KCAD in Grand Rapids. The event is free and open to the public, starting at 10 a.m. If you can’t make it in person, it streams live at wegeprize.org.
The Wege Prize is what great design is all about: Solving the world’s problems that are perceived to be too big, too entrenched or too politically poisoned to solve.
These students — most of them in their twenties, working across 14 universities in five countries — looked at banana peels and cocoa husks and dairy waste and saw solutions, as any good designer would do.
