Student’s Business Plan is the Bee’s Knees
Four Westmont students are abuzz about the business project they hope will empower women and children in the developing world through sustainable beekeeping. Beecause Uganda, created by Jakob Colombo, Charlotte Cheek, Mikaela Harn and Timmy Rizk, won the Westmont’s 27th business plan competition. This annual event encourages entries that could solve some of the deepest problems encountered by disadvantaged families in poverty-stricken areas.
In 2013, Rick Ifland, director of Westmont’s Eaton Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Westmont, shifted the focus of the completion toward finding solutions to help the poorest of the poor around the world.
The students have been working closely with the Santa Barbara Bee Keeping Association and Empowerment and Care Organization (EACO) in the Mukono district of Uganda. They seek to implement a bee business in Uganda that will provide a source of revenue for the community.
“For years, the people in the rural villages of Mukono have been struggling to deal with many problems, primarily HIV/AIDS and access to clean water,” Harn says. “The EACO is scraping together funds to feed a seemingly never-ending number of mouths. However, by harnessing the power of the African honey bee and using its natural product, honey, the EACO can create a sustainable way to generate income.”
According to a former director of the Ugandan National Apiculture Development Organization, the country has the potential to produce roughly 500,000 metric tons of honey per year, more than China, the world’s top producer.
“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for any community anywhere to start a beekeeping farm and generate enough revenue to become self-sustaining,” Colombo says. “Making this project replicable was at the core of our model. We have created a guide that allows others to duplicate this project in other areas around the world.”
Beecause is licensed under a creative commons license, allowing the students to grant permission to others to share and use their work without obtaining specific authorization for each use. “We want to make it as easy as possible for others to share and build upon our work,” Cheek says.
The team is focusing on its current project and delivering the needed equipment to Uganda. “We have been contacted by another community in South Africa that loves our project and wants to implement it there,” Rizk says. “We’re also pursuing a possible collaboration with a U.S.-based organization that’s empowering women and children through micro-financing in Uganda. They want to see if our project could possibly be micro-financed instead of relying on fundraising.
“We’re passionate about helping people in the developing world and believe that the best way to alleviate poverty is to empower communities to become sustainable and self-dependent. Establishing this bee business in Uganda is the first step in perfecting a model than can be replicated to help other communities.”
The struggling global bee population benefits from the project as well. “These insects are directly responsible for pollinating 70 percent of crop species that feed 90 percent of the world,” Cheek says. “Since 2006, billions of bees worldwide have died, including more than three million colonies in America.”
For more information, please visit beecauseuganda.com.