Written by: Naomi Linder
Students Adonna Andino, junior accounting major, and Ashley Blake, senior accounting major, collaborated with Enactus teams from all over the world while participating in the international “Action with Africa” Enactus challenge.
The students traveled to Bonn, Germany, on Sept. 26, with Southern Adventist University’s Enactus Sponsor Michelle Doucoumes, to attend the challenge’s main event. After presenting one of Southern’s Enactus chapter’s project, “Akuna Soap Industry,” to a panel of judges, the team placed seventh overall in the challenge, earning 8,000 euros in project funding. Andino is the current Akuna project manager, and Blake is a former Southern Enactus president who served as an on-site project manager and missionary in Zambia last school year.
In 2020, Joshua Draget, who was a Southern student at that time, served as a missionary at Riverside Farms in Zambia, according to Doucoumes, an associate business professor at Southern. While there, he realized there was a need for healthy, natural soap in the area, and he could do something about it. Riverside Farms produced soybeans, a primary ingredient in soap, and Draget began to experiment creating soaps until eventually the Enactus team at Southern picked up the project in January of 2021, Doucoumes said.
Since then, the small soap-making business – now called “Akuna Soap Industry” – has grown, providing jobs and soap for many locals.
“Basically, we employ locals to do the manufacturing, so we’re providing jobs for them. And then, we also employ local women and youth to sell it,” Doucoumes explained. “We wholesale the soap to the women and youth so they can basically start their own businesses … so it provides them a living.”
Southern’s Enactus members have dedicated much of their time and efforts to this project since the start, leading to continual expansion in an effort to help as many people as possible.
“We just this summer finished building our new factory, which is really cool,” said Doucoumes. “We have the capacity now to produce up to 12,800 bars of soap everyday … and our team here raised the money for that last year. We raised $145,000 for this factory.”
All these efforts and their outcomes were shared last April with the Enactus international organization when Southern’s chapter decided to enter the “Action with Africa” challenge. According to Doucoumes, a total of 210 teams registered for the challenge. And, because Akuna placed within the top eight projects, Southern’s chapter was granted the opportunity to represent the industry in Germany for the finals. Southern was the only university in the United States to place in the top eight, and the group’s trip expenses were paid for by Enactus, said Doucoumes.
The money won by the group will go toward purchasing a reliable energy source for the newly built factory in Zambia, as “the power grid in Zambia is unreliable,” said Doucoumes. With the project’s recent developments, Doucoumes said the industry is also planning to export and sell Akuna products in the U.S.
