Social ventures for Madagascar proposed at Winter Forum

<p>Winter Forum 2016 focused on sustainable living in Madagascar and concluded Tuesday at the Fuqua School of Business.</p>

Winter Forum 2016 focused on sustainable living in Madagascar and concluded Tuesday at the Fuqua School of Business.

Students at this year’s Winter Forum experimented with solutions to various problems hindering Madagascar’s development.

This year’s Winter Forum, which was held at the Fuqua School of Business and ended Tuesday, challenged students to solve economic, social and environmental problems currently confronting the country of Madagascar. Teams of participants met with mentors, heard from guest speakers and worked to develop innovative solutions during the forum.

Freshmen Pauline Grieb and Eudora Miao, sophomore Sebastian Lin, junior Jordan Lucore and senior Ted Yavuzkurt won the competition for their proposed social enterprise Mamboly, which would offer children secondary school scholarships to an agricultural science school which the team designed. While the team first considered technical solutions to food security issues, the group realized that technology was not the real problem and that other solutions were necessary.

“We realized that if we didn’t address communication barriers it wouldn’t matter how amazing of a gadget we invented,” Yavuzkurt said. “Our ‘innovation’ would collect dust if we didn’t solve the communication problem. From there, we decided that educating children was a better tactic than education adults.”

The agricultural science, or agronomy, school would focus on two agricultural practices—square foot farming and rice-fish culture. These practices would be a departure from the practice of slash and burn agriculture, known as tavy, which the team recognized as a source of immense biodiversity loss.

“We identified the reality that it is not easy or right to barge in and tell Malagasy farmers, who have been using the same agricultural techniques for centuries, to do it ‘our way,’” Grieb noted. “We realized that the key was to engage the children, as well as making the school into an open environment which villagers can actively be engaged in.”

The program would also compensate the children’s families both financially as well as agriculturally and would emphasize the development of field skills among the younger generation.

“Students will work on actual degraded land, bringing it back to productive use with the help of their teachers and new farming practices,” Yavuzkurt said. “In the process, their families and the wider community will see that these practices are safe and effective, and will be more willing to adopt them.”

The team received a $1,000 prize, which Grieb said could help them to implement their proposal.

Another team, named MedEx, won the Audience Choice Award for the team’s proposal to use drones for delivering essential medicines to economically and geographically barren regions of Madagascar.

The team, consisting of freshmen Shannon Malloy and sophomores Julia Myhre, Helen Lu and John Lu, wanted to address problems of access to medicine after learning about the scarcity of donated medications among the poor in Madagascar.

While these medications are free when donated by pharmaceutical companies such as Merck and Bayer, the people who need the medications cannot access due to the lack of infrastructure.

“Only 12 percent of the ‘roads’ are paved. Yet 80 percent of the people live in rural communities that take hours upon hours to reach,” John Lu said. “We wanted to bypass the poor infrastructure and use the open skies. Through drones, we can connect rural communities with disease and urban areas that have medicine.”

The team researched drones that have carrying capacities of more than 20 pounds and can fly nearly 60 kilometers, making them ideal for this particular challenge.

Lu noted that each team member’s previous experience with the different entrepreneurial, scientific and creative tasks helped developed the initiative. He added that their project won’t end at the Winter Forum.

“Our team plans on moving forward with our idea, using the funds from Winter Forum to fund our research into making our program a reality,” Malloy added. “It will require collaboration among NGOs and even corporate sponsors like Amazon currently employing drone technology. But for MedEx, the sky is not the limit; it is simply the beginning.”

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