Displaying items by tag: impact

BARBADOS MAKES ITS’ MARK AT THE GLOBAL ENTREPRENEURS SUMMIT 2019

The Global Entrepreneurs Summit (GES2019), held in The Hague, the Netherlands last June 3-5, with more than 1,700 corporate executives and government officials and 300 investors from 130 different countries, including 2 entrepreneurs from Barbados.

With over 16,000 applicants this year, the international conference, co-hosted by the US Department of Commerce and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, brought together 2,000 select world leaders in entrepreneurship, investment and policy during 65 sessions over two days. The theme of the conference “The Future Now’” focused on finding solutions to improve health, water, connectivity, agriculture/food and energy.

During one of the break-out sessions, the Workshop Resilient Islands, two young innovative Barbadian entrepreneurs, Dr. La-Tonia Arthur and Mr. Joshua Forte participated to represent Barbados in health and agriculture/food respectively.

Dr. Arthur is a medical doctor and serial entrepreneur, owner of Gentle Beginnings Daycare Inc, Mobile Doctors, The MD Clinic and Eatlye-2-Go. She focused on the challenges that Barbados is facing with its current healthcare system and highlighted areas where we could improve. In front of a panel consisting of the Minister of Medical Care for The Netherlands Mr. Bruno Bruins, US Deputy Secretary of Health & Human Services Mr. Eric Hargan, CEO Royal Phillips Frans van Houten, CEO Brigham & Women’s Hospital Dr. Adam Landman and Country Director Nigeria PharmAccess Ms. Njde Ndii, Dr. Arthur vowed to help keep Barbados current in the new wave with the partnerships made and advice gleaned.

Mr. Forte is the other passionate, driven entrepreneur who represented Red Diamond Compost, which focuses on Biotechnology and has developed processes of converting organic materials into targeted agricultural solutions, for crop protection, soil treatment, livestock and additional areas of climate-smart environmental management. He grasped the opportunity to learn from social ventures and impact-oriented investors backing innovations rapidly achieving scale and improving lives in frontier markets. Led by Bonnie Glick Deputy Administrator of the ‘US Agency for International Development’, Karen Hitschke Managing Director of ‘Yunus Social Business Global Initiatives’, Ella Gudwin President of VisionSpring, Sarah Bilson Lahaye Director of ‘Business Development One Acre Fund’ and Thomas Feeney Director of ‘Results for Development & International Development’. Mr. Forte also participated in the Elevator Pitch Booth, which streamed on GES TV throughout the event, using every opportunity share his mission for climate resilience & food and nutrition security for Barbados, CARICOM and beyond.

GES2019 was able to set the stage for Barbados to connect with investors and policy makers from across the globe, a great opportunity to foster potential partnerships and deals.

Strangely enough, these two young people had never met prior to this event but, as the saying goes, ‘there is a Bajan everywhere’ and by the looks of things, Barbados is in good hands for the future.