Marcia BRANDON

Description

WUSME AMBASSADRESS IN THE BARBADOS

Ms. Brandon is Managing Director/Chief Entrepreneurship Expert – Caribbean Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Livelihoods (CoESL) NGO.

She has a relevant experience in entrepreneurship, which allowed her to:
• Establish the first sustainable NGO in youth development economic empowerment in the Caribbean
• Pioneer youth entrepreneurship development in the region and accelerated entrepreneurship in general
• Help over 4000 entrepreneurs and SMEs to start and build businesses, survival rate of 75% after 5 years
• Train, mentor and coach over 100 community based tourism SMEs in countries including Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago, Dominica, Antigua and Grenada in business development and resilience.
• Work with over 1000 youth and women in the Caribbean in communities exposing them to the concept of complementary capitalism through Villages as Businesses concept.
• Pioneer the first regional innovation challenge in the Caribbean
• Develop a strong, extensive, regional and global network and mobilized regional partners for entrepreneurship ecosystem development
• Implement the first Persistent Organic Pollutants GEF SGP project in Barbados and replicated it in St. Vincent & the Grenadines in partnership with CS Inc.
• Use coaching and mentoring, helped entrepreneurs, agripreneurs, climate tech entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and others to develop capacity. Helped NGOs, Government programmes and entrepreneurs to develop sustainability strategies and plans.
• Create the first female focused entrepreneurship programme in the region/Started youth agripreneurship programme in the Caribbean
• Create framework, general and specific policy approaches, statutes, standards, processes, procedures, systems and a structured approach to content development, programmes and projects implementation within organizations.
• Create the award for recognizing youth in social entrepreneurship/Designed, wrote and implemented over 20 development projects
• Source over 10million United States dollars in grant funding for social and economic development in the Caribbean