Two Guyanese youths, Adaiah Fyffe and Crystal Charles, won second and third places in the recent Nestlé Vision to Reality: Start-Up Challenge, which was held in collaboration with Junior Achievement (JA) Jamaica.
This was announced in a release from Guyana Economic Development Trust (GEDT), the originator of the challenge which was done in collaboration with !nnovate Guyana, a US/Guyana platform that showcases Guya-nese inventiveness and Junior Achievement (JA) Jamaica, a registered non-governmental organisation and a member nation of Junior Achievement Worldwide, the world’s largest organisation dedicated to educating students about work readiness, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programmes.
The Challenge is a competitive programme that began on June 07. It consisted of eight weeks of entrepreneurship workshops, covering key topics as strengthening business ideas, business ethics and planning; all intended to help participants to turn their ideas into viable business ventures.
According to the release, the Nestlé Vision to Reality competition engaged participants between the ages of 18 to 29 from across four Caribbean countries – Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. In Guyana, the programme was coordinated by !nnovate Guyana/GEDT, where staff and volunteers from Guyana and the diaspora delivered training sessions. A total of 23 participants were mentored and the training and mentoring sessions concluded on September 30 with a Pitch Competition, where the top three entrants from each country, including Guyana, competed for a grand prize in funding.
The winners were announced on October 6 at the Nestlé Caribbean Youth Summit. First prize of US$3,000 went to an entrepreneur from Barbados, Rheanna Chen. Second place and US$2,000 went to Guyana’s Adaiah Fyffe and third place and US$1,000 went to Crystal Charles, also of Guyana.
Fyffe secured the second place prize with ‘Wild Rupununi’, a startup company that combines the drying of fruits and vegetables together with a cash trade system to offer a solution to post-harvest losses of fruits and vegetables. Using the sun-drying method, it partly preserves the nutritional quality of fresh products, especially minerals and fibres, while tackling seasonal scarcity of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Charles was awarded third place with her environmentally-friendly and biodegradable invention – ENBIO. Her invention is a multi-product sisal production business aimed at cultivating and processing sisal fibers to produce value-added products such as bioplastics and cardboard packaging.
The awardees expressed their gratitude at being given the opportunity to showcase their products and noted that the training and experience will help perfect their businesses.
“The experience at JA was awesome. It was informative and once paired with a mentor that was an added benefit that boosted my confidence to try harder to make it work,” Fyffe was quoted as saying. “Throughout this whole journey I have learned that if you want something, then you must have the confidence and belief to pursue it no matter how unrealistic it may seem. That’s why although some of my objectives may take a while to come into fruition, I will still endlessly pursue them,” Charles meanwhile asserted.
