Fundación Paraguaya's Financially Self-Sufficient Organic Farm School

What it does: rural agricultural high school specializing in entrepreneurship
Web site: www.fundacionparaguaya.org.py
Based: El Cerrito, Paraguay
Founded: 2002
Employees: 20
Revenue: $310,516 (2007)

Founded as a parochial boarding school for the area's poor boys in the early 1950s, the boarding high school's new mission is "to impart practical and entrepreneurial education to poor farmers to empower them to succeed economically." When the nonprofit Fundación Paraguaya took over the ownership and operation of the Farm School in late 2002, it resolved to walk the talk of entrepreneurship—to make the school market-driven and financially self-sufficient. To do so, the school developed 16 sub-enterprises on campus, including a hotel, a dairy, and a restaurant. "There's a natural assumption that the food chain starts with the farmer who knows how to farm," says Nik Kafka, director of Fundación Paraguaya's sister organization. "But the reality in most developing countries … is that just isn't the case. The educational system is set up to deliver people a piece of paper that shows their academic prowess, but students aren't really learning how to be farmers, and this is the missing link in the food chain." The Farm School is designed to be this missing link.

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