Wharton Students Aid Peruvian Rainforest Global Consulting Practicum Visits Remote Yanesha Community
Building a product distribution network in the rainforest is hard enough. It doesn’t get any easier when the only bridge into town is washed out.
This was just one of the challenges faced by six members of the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum (GCP) in their recent trip to Peru’s Palcazu Valley. There they met the indigenous Yanesha people, a growing community of artisans working to build a sustainable lifestyle in the rainforest.
Conservation and Profit
In January 2005, the GCP team traveled to Lima, Peru and its surrounding rainforest, to consult for the non-profit Partnerships and Technology for Sustainability (PaTS). PaTS aims to preserve the forests of the Palcazu Valley by creating sustainable industry for the indigenous Yanesha people who call the valley their home.
The group teaches the Yanesha to use the rainforest – their most abundant natural resource – to create furniture, housewares, and accessories. It’s a far cry from just a few years ago, when the Yanesha lived as subsistence farmers and sold off their trees to logging companies.
“Now not only are they able to sustain the forest,” reports trip participant Lisa Linn de Barona, “but they’re able to send their children to school, invest in community buildings, and do all kinds of things they couldn’t do before.”
The team spent nine days in Peru, meeting the Yanesha artisans and their families and studying how they made and distributed their product. These experiences helped them understand first-hand the obstacles — especially the difficulties of travel in the Palcazu valley — that the Yanesha must overcome to build and ship their product.
Now back in the States, the students have to find new ways of getting the Yanesha goods into stores, translating the artisans’ craftsmanship into a marketable brand.
Their plan is to market Yanesha goods as both high-quality and eco-friendly. “We are looking to new markets like fair trade stores, environmental and rainforest alliances and art galleries,” explains Lauren Bloomer, WG ’06. These revenues will help provide a sustainable lifestyle for the Yanesha, while helping to preserve the rainforest and move its people beyond subsistence farming.
Hands-On Global Learning Experiences In the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum, Wharton MBA candidates engage with the real world of consulting for international companies. The companies get a North American business plan, and the students learn valuable lessons about creating and implementing a business strategy.
Typically, students break into about a dozen small teams, each assigned to a specific company. Each team visits its company on site, then returns to the classroom to develop consulting advice.
Last year, the GCP also launched Social Impact Management projects, which take students to parts of the world where most Fortune 500 companies don’t have a regional office, and where luxuries like air conditioning, plumbing, electricity, and working roads may be little more than a memory.
In the words of Shaowei Ying, WG’05, “It is definitely gratifying to know that there are for-profit companies who are sincerely assisting impoverished communities and promoting the sustainability of the environment.”
The Peru trip is a perfect example of these far-flung Wharton MBA learning experiences. As Lisa Linn de Barona says, “They don’t teach you in Marketing 101 that learning some Yanesha may be helpful! The book knowledge you’ve received may or may not apply to what you’re actually doing out in the rainforest.”
