Where do water and entrepreneurship overlap?
My name is Edrulfo Rodriguez and I’m from Esteli, a city located in the mountainous region in northern Nicaragua. After graduating with a major in Systems Engineering, I enrolled in the development sector working for a local NGO, which focuses on water, food security and entrepreneurship projects in rural communities. I have traveled to many communities in my country and I’ve experienced their daily struggles trying to get water to cover their most basic needs.
I learned that water issues are linked to many other problems that hit the families’ sustainability, like their ability to perform their duties and the ability to produce more. I believe the problems around water as a whole, should be addressed through the optics of entrepreneurship, because the rural communities need to be empowered and strengthen with adequate trainings focused on allowing them to become entrepreneurs. You can understand the potential of the rural areas with a single visit to their households and its surroundings: so many richness being wasted, so many potential in the young people and so many resources being unnoticed.
Now, while working with Engineers Without Borders USA, I became more passionate about supporting rural communities through the energy and work of thousands of volunteers. But I’m also an advocate of community empowerment through entrepreneurship based in water availability. With water, people can sustain their lives, but also they can produce, innovate, process, sell and create their own financial sustainability opportunities. I’m sure UNLEASH LAB will provide hundreds of opportunities and brilliant ideas, where the words “water”, “engineering” and “entrepreneurship”, can become a life-changing reality for many rural people, and move us a step closer towards achieving the SDG.
