Caribbean Beat — January/February 2018 (#149)

Marc Bruxelle/shutterstock.com
“Being successful as an entrepreneur
comes from you having the latitude
to fail,” explains Johanan Dujon
Courtesy
Johanan Dujon
room,” he says. “You start small and you look for opportunities
for partnerships. [Algas] is an excellent example of a partnership
that has brought results in a short period of time.”
Romulus said he hopes the project will grow if another
injection of funding is approved. In addition to the manufacturing
plant, he’d like to see Algas set up a research lab. “We
want expansion beyond sargassum,” he says. “St Lucia has a
lot of endemic plants that need to be studied. I believe that
there are chemicals in our plants in the Caribbean that are yet
untouched.”
Last year, Dujon was a presenter at the Earth Optimism Summit
organised by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.
The inaugural event was intended to celebrate and share successful
ideas in environmental protection. Dujon was selected
after responding to an invitation for submissions, and may have
been the only representative from the English-speaking Caribbean.
“We, in all of the environmental challenges that we’re
faced with, have the opportunity to convert them into profitable
ventures,” he told the audience.
He presented test results that show Algas fertiliser performing
better than the big American brand Miracle-Gro, and touted
its organic nature. “Our product reduces the need for synthetic
chemicals, which leach out into our soils and into our waters
and increases your yield,” he told the summit. “If you match
innovation with funding, mentorship, technical support, and
community and environmental conscience, what you’re going to
get is a revolutionary solution which can stand out at the global
scale,” he concluded.
There’ve been other ideas bandied about for making productive
use of sargassum. A team at the University of the West
Indies St Augustine campus has experimented with turning it
into plastic. Barbadian environmental entrepreneur Mark Hill
has made it into food and particleboard. But Dujon’s project
seems to be the first to really bear fruit.
He’s encountered other people who had the idea to convert
the sargassum into salable fertiliser. “They had the idea but they
couldn’t do it,” he says. “Entrepreneurship is about risks. I am
twenty-something. If I leave my job and this doesn’t work, I can
do something else. Being successful as an entrepreneur comes
from you having the latitude to fail. If you have a mortgage and
children and a wife, it’s not OK to fail. The younger you, are the
easier it should be to take risks.”
The region needs more venture capitalists, he says, to put
money into risky but potentially lucrative start-up businesses.
“Once you have that kind of network, then you would see entrepreneurship
really take off.” n
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