Waterless face wash wins NZ girls top contest award

Two teams from New Zealand won the top two prizes in the FedEx Express/Junior Achievement International Trade Challenge Asia Pacific, in which students in the region competed with business plans for a beauty product to market in Kenya.

Held for the eighth consecutive year, the competition hosted 54 participants, aged 15 to 19, from nine economies. Its goal is to inspire young people to use their entrepreneurial instincts to improve lives and communities.

Shannon Metcalfe and Isabelle Stangl, both 18, were crowned winners for their waterless face wash that also addresses the problem of trachoma, a curable but blindness-inducing eye disease that affects more than 60,000 people in Kenya, often because of a lack of clean water to wash their faces.

"We were overwhelmed when we won the right to represent New Zealand," Metcalfe and Stangl said.

The girls were flown here to compete against 26 teams from the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, New Zealand and Hong Kong.

This year's challenge was to come up with a business plan in less than three days for a beauty product in Kenya that would also address a social issue.