On Tuesday, July 5, 2016…
During the first week in Ñamarin we worked a lot with schools, mostly teaching English to the kids. One of my main projects is also developing a financial literacy program pilot for Soluciones Comunitarias in Ecuador, so we spent some time compiling information for this and working on how our workshop would be planned. During our time near Saraguro, I also consulted for a cheese factory named El Wagrero, and helped them with their marketing efforts including social media, creating a website, and designing several billboard ideas for them. All of this went pretty well for our consulting project, and they were very receptive to all of our ideas and work.
The next week we left for Zamora. During our time here we worked on refining the financial literacy workshop that we were piloting in Zamora. We piloted the first workshop here, and due to many different factors it did not go nearly as well as we had hoped. We spent time regrouping in Cuenca and speaking with an expert on the workshops who ran them in Haiti very successfully. In Pulingui we hope to try again with the workshops with a much better outcome now that we have a better idea of what to expect.
I also spent a large portion of my time here working with three other interns on another project that we picked up that involved a solution for teaching business remotely We ended up taking this idea and running with it, and are now in the process of starting a company named Pakta Consulting that works to connect Latin American (primarily Ecuadorian for the time being) entrepreneurs and small businesses to university students who could do pro-bono consulting for them. Since we are all from different universities, we would be able to launch up Pakta starting with Notre Dame, Princeton, University of Maryland, and University of Connecticut. We plan on developing a strategic plan and a functioning website for our business while we are in Pulingui.
(Quinn Brown is minoring in International Development Studies.)