Nestlé Vision to Reality: Start-Up Challenge: Guyanese innovators cop 2nd, 3rd prizes in Caribbean

Adaiah Fyffe and Crystal Charles, two Guyanese innovators, emerged second and third place winners, respectively, in the recent Nestlé Vision to Reality: Start-Up Challenge, which began on June 7 in collaboration with Junior Achievement (JA) Jamaica.
The programme consisted of eight (8) weeks of entrepreneurship workshops, covering key topics such as strengthening business ideas, business ethics and planning; all intended to help participants to turn their ideas into viable business ventures.
The winners were announced on October 6, at the Nestlé Caribbean Youth Summit.
Fyffe and Charles won US$2000 and US$1000, respectively.
Fyffe copped the second-place prize with “Wild Rupununi”, a start-up company that combines the drying of fruits and vegetables with the 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.
Meanwhile, Charles copped the 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 fibres to produce value-added products such as bioplastics and cardboard packaging.
The awardees expressed how grateful they are for the opportunity and how the training and experience will help perfect their businesses.
Fyffe said “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”.
“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 posited.
The Nestlé Vision to Reality competition engaged participants between the ages of 18-29 from across four Caribbean countries – Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados and Guyana.
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. 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.
!nnovate Guyana is a platform that showcases Guyanese inventiveness. !nnovate Guyana consists of the Guyana Innovation Prize, which supports ag-science and ag-tech start-ups; !nnovate Guyana TV on YouTube; the Economic Development Accelerator for growing agro-processors; the Global Entrepreneurship Network Guyana chapter; and the Executive Volunteer Corps, which engages the diaspora and friends of Guyana to support innovators in Guyana’s burgeoning start-up ecosystem.
!nnovate Guyana is offered by the Guyana Economic Development Trust (GEDT), an independent US and Guyana initiative.
Meanwhile, JA Jamaica is 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.
JA’s programmes help to prepare young people for the real world by showing them how to generate wealth and effectively manage it, how to create jobs that make their communities more robust, and how to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the workplace.