The Atlanta-based Kayongo and his Global Soap Project have been recognised for their effort to collect used hotel soap from across the United States then cleaning and reprocessing for shipment to impoverished nations such as Haiti, Uganda, Kenya and Swaziland.
According to CNN, Kayongo, 41, thought of the idea in the early 1990s, when he first arrived to the U.S. and stayed at a hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He noticed that his bathroom was replenished with new soap bars every day, even though they were only slightly used.
"I was shocked just to know how much (soap) at the end of the day was thrown away," Kayongo said.
Each year, hundreds of millions of soap bars are discarded in North America alone.
"Are we really throwing away that much soap at the expense of other people who don't have anything? It just doesn't sound right."
"I tried to return the new soap to the concierge since I thought they were charging me for it," Kayongo said. "When I was told it was just hotel policy to provide new soap every day, I couldn't believe it."
Kayongo called his father -- a former soap maker in Uganda -- and shared the experience.
"My dad said people in America can afford to throw it away. But I just started to think, 'What if we took some of this soap and recycled it, made brand new soap from it and then sent it home to people who couldn't afford soap?' "
Kayongo fled Uganda to Kenya with his parents 30 years ago because of the mass torture and killings by former Ugandan military dictator Idi Amin.
"It's a long-term grieving process that sort of never ends," he said. "As a child coming from school, passing dead bodies for 10 solid years -- 'It's not cool,' as my son would put it. It's not good. A lot of my friends were orphaned, and I was lucky."
"We lost everything," Kayongo said. "We didn't live in the camps, but we sacrificed a lot. The people worse off lived in the camps. Soap was so hard to come by, even completely nonexistent sometimes. People were getting so sick simply because they couldn't wash their hands."