(MENAFN - Arab News) Dar Al-Hekma College hosted the US-Saudi Women's Forum on Social Entrepreneurship on March 2-3, which offered students the opportunity to present their projects to judges, before first, second and third place winners were announced.

In March 2009, 130 students from local colleges and universities enroled in a two-week session of lectures and workshops on social entrepreneurship.

Again in July 2009, Babson College's Center for Women's Leadership and Wellesley Center for Women and ICF International in Washington, D.C. selected 30 students and developed their proposals for six projects on social entrepreneurship.

The final step was to choose the winners and reward them with an amount of money that would help them start their projects.

The forum is designed to enhance skills of young women in the area of social entrepreneurship, which would not only enrich their lives but would also help their communities through the application of business and leadership skills to social needs.

The winners of the contest were:

- Green Jeddah, an environmental awareness group, won first place ($4,000 prize) for promoting recycling and sustainable development.

- Link Youth, a group aimed at creating an online database to link stakeholders and the community to build a social responsibility network, won second place ($3,000 prize).

- Sadah, which promotes job promotion and micro lending for hearing-impaired women, won third place ($2,000).

"It was an award well deserved for all of them, but Green Jeddah was fantastic, not only one segment would benefit from it, unlike the other projects, but the whole society. "In fact, the whole world would benefit from it. They easily earned the first place," said Nadia Baeshen, college professor and one of the judges of this event.