As students prepare to return to Duke, 100 undergraduates will be developing solutions to the challenges that face Madagascar's exotic species and human population.
This year’s Winter Forum, which is sponsored by Undergraduate Education, the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative and Duke Lemur Center, will task students with confronting the lack of sustainable living in Madagascar by designing scientific and technological solutions to its regional problems. The Forum challenges students to address the economic, educational, social and health infrastructure of the country and establish a plan to solve these widespread problems by the year 2030.
The Winter Forum will be held January 10-12 at the Fuqua School of Business.
“When the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative agreed to develop the program for this year’s Winter Forum, we wanted to build upon Duke’s global renown as a leader in social entrepreneurship education,” said Matthew Nash, the I&E Initiative's managing director for social entrepreneurship.
In response to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development developed by the United Nations in September, the I&E Initiative organized a challenge centered on innovative ways of developing Madagascar, a biologically diverse island with a variety of endangered species.
The threat faced by lemurs, a group of primates found only in Madagascar, inspired the program’s collaboration with the Duke Lemur Center, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2016.
Winter Forum 2016 will also aim to solve one of the UN's sustainable development goals—limiting anthropogenic hazards and ending human-induced extinctions.
Nash said that students will “learn and use approaches of design thinking to develop sustainable innovations with undergraduate teammates, faculty and outside experts.”
The 100 participating students will be divided into teams that compete for money and receive coaching and support to translate winning proposals into implementable solutions. The I&E Initiative will continue to work with winning students through Design to Impact, a new social entrepreneurship incubator.
Through the Forum, students will be introduced to existing efforts to combat problems in Madagascar. Conservation coordinator Charles Welch oversees conservation work at the Lemur Center, including a project centered on the mountainous, rainforested SAVA region of northeast Madagascar.
“SAVA Conservation is a multifaceted and community-based project," Welch noted. "Though we support and are involved in research on lemurs and forest ecology, our primary activities range from support of family planning, to fish farming, to reforestation, to sustainable agriculture, environmental education and more."
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