Pinoy team makes it to MIT tilt finals

A team of young Filipino entrepreneurs has qualified as one of five finalists in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

The winners will be announced on Thursday night (this morning, Manila time) at the MIT Kresge Auditorium in Boston.

The project, CentroMigrante Inc., provides clean, safe and affordable housing for the thousands of indigent, transient job seekers who leave their homes in the rural areas to come to the city to look for overseas jobs.

The project initially targets the estimated one million Filipinos who come to Metro Manila every year looking for jobs as seafarers, and who end up living in shanties around the port areas as they wait for placements and processing of papers.

CentroMigrante combines developmental architecture with a self-help business model to offer a sustainable solution to the problem of urban housing for transients.

Rather than working on a donation or charity model, CentroMigrante’s pilot shelter in Manila has operated viably and even profitably for two years, serving over 80,000 job-seeking Filipinos.

The team is seeking to expand into a network of shelters in Mtro Manila by the last quarter of the year on an initial $100,000 investment.

The MIT$100K Entrepreneurship Competition is designed to encourage students and researchers to act on their talent, ideas and energy to produce tomorrow’s business firms. Now on its 16th year, the competition has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and business start-up services to outstanding teams of student entrepreneurs.

The CentroMigrante team, the first Filipino team to reach the finals of this competition, is led by Illac Diaz, a research fellow in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies at MIT, and includes Neil Ruiz, a PhD candidate in political economy at MIT; Tina Laforteza, a corporate internal strategy consultant with an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management; Artessa Saldivar-Sali, a professor of civil engineering at UP with a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from MIT; Chester Yu, an MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School; and Bianca Locsin, a Yale Law School graduate who runs the programs for the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Foundation in the Philippines.

The same team earlier won two other competitions at MIT, including the grand prize in the IDEAS Competition with their First Step Coral project, an innovative turbine that uses seawater current to regenerate coral at a faster rate.

They also bagged the second prize for the Peanut Revolution project, an easily replicable cement-based machine that speeds up the shelling of peanuts by 50 times, a big boost to peanut farmers all over the country.

The team also won the $1K Business Warm-up Competition for their Earth Classroom project which builds classrooms in rural areas at half the usual cost, using sustainable materials mostly of soil stabilized by ash and lime.

Four other projects are in the running in the development category, while there are eight finalists in the venture category. Winners receive cash awards totaling $100,000.