Ecole Entrepreneur (Days 1-3 with the Students)

In Pandiassou, there is an agriculture school where students come to learn the trade.  The teacher agronomists send out their students each morning for practice.  Sometimes they go to help the Little Sisters with their fields in front of the house.  Or maybe they work on fields at the Little Brothers' house... or a myriad of institutions connected to PFI/PSI (Petits Frères/Petites Soeurs de l'Incarnation is the French for Little Brothers/Little Sisters of the Incarnation).  Other times they work on the plot directly on school grounds.

However, the school is much more than a simple agriculture school... it focuses on fostering the entrepreneurial spirit in young men and women to form secondary income-generating activities.  This school is specifically inspiring farmers to increase their profits by engaging in value-added food processing or finding other ways of extracting value from their crop waste.  Thus, the reason Brother Armand suggested we team up for my project.

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of meeting the 120 young men and women who make up the current cohort at the school, giving an overview of the briquetting pilot I endeavor to establish in their township.  However, I needed their help to see if this could be a successful business in the community.  After all, they better knew the intended institutional customers (e.g., schools, nutritional centers, and religious fraternities) than I did... they may even know some of the crop waste suppliers (sugar mills and other food processors - eventually individual farmers) than I do.  In return for their efforts, I would guide them in customer needs assessments, resource and business planning, and all the analytics that go into forming a business... not to mention the process itself.

With the absolute silence during my introduction, you would assume that there was little interest in a charcoal briquetting endeavor.  At 20 minutes, I finally opened it up to Q&A.  After a single minute of hearing crickets chirp in the background, a single student asked a clarifying question on the materials we could use in the process.  After that, it was a blizzard of questions from more process-oriented questions to inquiries into what form of business I envisioned for this project, how open I was to starting up satellite endeavors in other departments right away (30% will return to other parts of Haiti after the April graduation date), what the most significant challenges or drawbacks there are to this project, as well as what particular advantages I see having over other forms of fuel. 

The quality of the questions was particularly encouraging.

Wednesday afternoon, I ran through our protocol (developed in part with the teachers) and some minor interviewing etiquette with half the students.  Again, the barrage of questions was particularly encouraging... though 50% were understandably logistics oriented.  After a quick check-in with Brother Armand on the institutions PFI/PSI holds a relationship with... we sent out almost half of our teams for interviews on Thursday morning (the rest are being organized for next week).  After a quick debrief on any difficult conversations or lessons learned... the students were off for the weekend.  Many returned to their hometowns today in anticipation of the election... not due back at school until Tuesday morning, where we will pick back up on our customer interviews and begin a demonstration of the production process.