Agora Partnerships is a start-up NGO and Venture Fund that provides business consulting to small businesses in Nicaragua that have high growth potential. At the end of a 6-week consulting period, Agora Venture Fund then decides whether to invest in a given company utilizing a variety of debt and equity instruments. My internship
involved consulting with four entrepreneurs and participating in the investment decision/deal structuring process for two.
This internship was such a tremendous experience on so many levels. I spent a lot of my time “in the field” studying the operations and finances of these fledgling companies. I think I drew something from almost every class I took during my first year at Duke with substantial contributions coming from operations, managerial accounting and corporate finance.
Possibly the best part of this experience was cultivating really strong relationships with the entrepreneurs. We not only invested in these companies financially, but also emotionally to a certain extent. Here is a synopsis of my two largest projects.
1. Calzado Reyes
Santos Reyes has a degree from ULAM (Universidad de las Americas) in International Business. Prior to returning to school, he worked for 10 years in shoe factories in Mexico and Honduras. In 1995 he started a shoe-making shop in Nicaragua with a Honduran partner and in 1998 became the sole owner of Calzado Reyes. Along with his wife and business partner Jacquelin, Santos has partnered with the second largest shoe distributor in Nicaragua and is looking to triple his volume of sales. With Agora’s investment, he will have one of the most industrialized shoe operations in Nicaragua.
2. Bambucasa
If you google Jan Van Bilsen, you will not find anything about bamboo housing. After a brief stint as a philosophy professor in his native country Belgium, van Bilsen came to Nicaragua to document the revolution as a freelance filmmaker. He is perhaps most well-known for his footage of what is now called “the wedding day massacre.” when Van Bilsen risked his life to ensure some of the greatest atrocities of the war were broadcast to the world.
While van Bilsen was filming a documentary in Ecuador after the devastating 1998 earthquake, he noticed that overnight local priests had erected forty shelters out of bamboo. “I was amazed at how fast they came up. I visited the same houses two years later and they were still there. These bamboo houses that had been put up as temporary shelter were still standing. I asked the people, do you like the houses? They said yes, they are part of our culture. People had planted flowers around them and little trees. They became real homes.”
Inspired and intrigued by what he saw, Van Bilsen began to educate himself on the properties of bamboo and talk with biologists, architects and experts. His findings were promising on many levels. Bamboo is the earth’s fastest growing plant and serves an important ecological role maintaining the balance between oxygen and carbon. Bamboo’s flexible fibers make it ideal for construction and allows for great resistance to heavy winds and earthquakes. This is especially relevant in Nicaragua which is nestled on top of a fault line and is victim to frequent hurricanes, the most devastating of which left 800,000 homeless. As Van Bilsen came to learn, many countries in the developing world, like Colombia and Thailand, were already relying on bamboo construction to solve their housing crises and he saw great potential to promote these ideas at home.
You can see pictures on my very outdated blog: http://gitarebba.livejournal.com
