Three teams win Agro-entrepreneurship Summit 2021
Annually, second-year students at EARTH University team up to develop socially conscious entrepreneurial ventures that actively address global problems. These projects demonstrate the students’ values, such as commitment to community, sustainable development, and biodiversity conservation, while honing their ability to organize, innovate, lead, collaborate, and persevere.
19 teams competed for the award.
EARTH’s Cumbre Agroempresarial (Agro-entrepreneurship Summit) was created to incentivize top-quality student work, publicize their diverse pursuits, and deepen their connection to their primary stakeholder – the community. This year, the Summit was held in partnership with Futureco Bioscience, a Spanish agrobiotechnology manufacturer. Nineteen teams – consisting of 109 young people from 27 countries – competed to win the top prize.
Weeks prior, EARTH staff and faculty had met with the teams via SharePoint to review their progress. From those meetings, the finalists were selected. Those six teams then presented their respective enterprise at the Summit, held July 20 via Zoom. Each team harnessed its members’ skills of public speaking, video production, and digital-content creation to wow the crowd.
To determine the winners, the community’s choice was weighted at 20 percent, while the judging panel’s marks were weighted at 80 percent. Below are the three winning teams.
- Sabores del Trópico dehydrates tropical fruits and markets them as a healthy snack.
- Akabenzi Farm breeds and raises free-range pigs without growth promoters, to be sold as meat.
- Exotic Chocolate prepares artisanal chocolates with local ingredients and surprising flavors.
“We are all winners when we strive daily to be better people,” said Roger Castellón, entrepreneurship professor at EARTH. “This is what our students have demonstrated throughout this exciting process.”
To every team, congratulations! The great effort you invested in your ventures is admirable. ¡Sigan adelante!
