Marcel Wah is a serial entrepreneur whose interests span art and design, technology, events, tourism, agriculture, and real estate. Marcel is the Founder and President of Studio Wah Exhibitions, LLC, producer of the International Caribbean Art Fair (ICAFair). He is also the Founder and CEO of several startups: The Diaspora Group, LLC, a holding company and parent to the 11thdepartment.com, which is an online platform for Haitian Professionals and Friends of Haiti; Twin River Media, a full-service Internet company; MMCS Events, a platform for events organizers, suppliers, and associations; and Moldova 4Ever, a tourism platform for Moldova. He is also the publisher of several online magazines: Haiti Business Week (HBW) and Caribbean Art World (CAW) Magazine.

Marcel was born into a well-known family of Haitian-Chinese artists in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and is himself a well-respected artist. He holds a Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts, respectively.

Marcel spends most of his time traveling between the US and Moldova, his adopted country.

Beverly Malbranche is a finance major at North Carolina State University. Beverly co-founded Caribbrew, a social enterprise that sells ethically sourced coffee from Haiti to the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

Beverly’s experiences include but are not limited to preparing financial reports for internal audits and tax purposes, overseeing supply chain logistics from and offshore suppliers, and social media marketing. She has been involved with the College G.V. Peniel to improve education in Haiti and has led conferences on entrepreneurship for youth living in the South of Haiti, particularly Miragoane and Saint Michel du Sud.

Beverly is skilled in website maintenance and has specialty in Capital markets operations from deals pricing for IPOs to FINRA and SEC compliance, involving AML, Debt Research, and Municipal Securities. She is currently working for a Goldman Sachs portfolio company, where she is responsible for the acquisition of new clients.

Wisblaude is a medical researcher with over 5+ years’ experience conducting clinical and community-based research, focusing on oncology, dermatology and public health.

Prior to joining Yale School of Medicine as a Postgraduate researcher, he has worked with institutions such as: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medical College, Rockefeller University, YMCA, Milberg LLP.

Wisblaude has spent four years of his academic career focusing on the impact of foreign aid on underdeveloped states like Haiti. Shortly after the fatal earthquake, he served as a volunteer member of the Mentoring and Evaluation Committee for Equal Health, a non-profit organization that provides training to Haitian healthcare professionals. As a public servant, he interned at the office of Congressman Charles Rangel (NY-13^th District), where he drafted briefings/memos, managed constituents inquires and conducted healthcare policy research. Wisblaude is an influential local leader in the Haitian Diaspora communities. During his height year’s tenure as director of Youth Department at his local church, he organized mission trips to Haiti, community events and various workshops on leadership, entrepreneurship, healthcare and financial literacy.

He holds a B.A., in International Studies with a focus on Development from City College of New York; and received Outstanding Delegate for Model United Nation award from the National Collegiate College Association (NCCA) and a Certificate of Leadership and Service from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Marc Alin Raphael is a tech-driven entrepreneur with industrial engineering and project management background. He’s currently leading the promising cybersecurity company KeySupreme in Sillicon Valley. Before launching his IT consulting firm RelinkUs in New York in 2013, he worked for several multinational and Fortune 100 companies such as IBM and PwC as an Information Technology Professional in South America. At the same level of his passion for technology is his determination to meaningfully contribute to the development of Haiti. Whether it is to restructure the IT infrastructure of a Haitian embassy abroad (embajadahaiti.com), to build a software to teach how to read, write and the basics of computer to illiterate adults (alphabetanetization.org), or to create a platform to improve Haiti’s image on the internet (okhaiti.com), he is always involved in a project  related to Haiti. He firmly believes that the promotion of entrepreneurship, the implementation of a new education system which fully embraces the latest technologies and a civic program to positively change the Haitian mentality is the key to the country’s development.

Paul Obed Dumersaint saw the light for the first time on September 2, 1989 in Pétion-ville. Given to his parents’ belief in education, he had the opportunity to receive a fair primary and secondary education at Collège Méthodiste de Frères. Later, he benefited from a scholarship granted by State University of Haiti to study agronomy at Faculté d’Agronomie et Médecine Vetérinaire where he completed his courses on July 2014.

His passion to ensure well-being in people’s life led him to prefer medicine over agronomy but grace to his first vocational experiences both with RESEPAG and AMECOH; he started to enjoy working on agriculture and environment fields and to apprehend their real impact on people’s life. Afterward, he worked subsequently for MARNDR, GERTEN GREENHOUSES, AGRITECH, CIMMYT and CECI as surveyor, team coordinator, plant-growing assistant, data operator and emergency evaluator. Presently, he is processing his first research paper under the auspices of USAID-AVANSE.

Because, himself suffered from hunger while his father used to be unemployed for years; he developed a vivid desire to embrace an entrepreneurial journey. Therefore, on 2013, he co-founded PRODHASA with Tertulien Felix as for a private business involved in creating jobs and empowering fruits and vegetables chain value.

He cherishes the vision to advance sustainable development in allying entrepreneurship and agriculture in order to fight against food insecurity and job scarcity. He also wants to be the first instigator of biotechnological research in Haiti.

I am a 1993 graduate of Pace University Business School with a major in Finance. Currently, as a consultant, I am working as an AML/BSA/SANCTIONS Compliance Officer for BBVA Compass Bank in NY. Also, I am managing a team at SCHELANED S.A, the parent company of Radio-Tele Heritage, CBG Warehouse and Heritage Computer Center in the City of Petit Goave, Haiti.

Prior to BBVA I have worked at UBS Investment Bank in Stanford, CT as a Compliance Officer for the Anti Money Laundering and Financial Intelligence Monitoring group. I started my career in operations in 1992 at Dean Witter, now JP Morgan Chase, where I have covered various phases of financial operations.  I have worked at FINRA for ten years primarily as an Examiner and Surveillance Manager.

Before leaving FINRA as a Field Supervisor in October 2005, I had the opportunity to examine book& records and financial strength of major Wall Street firms. During my tenure at FINRA, I managed a team of examiners; I specialized in AML, Financial Operations, Corporate Debt, Trade Reporting for Equities & TRACE eligible securities, Mutual Fund and Municipal securities.

Like at BBVA, At UBS, I was responsible for monitoring all Investment Banking and Corresponding banking transactions of major corporations in the United States and the world. I have routinely interacted with the financial world and governmental agencies responsible for enforcing international laws related to money laundering.

In June 2006, I have opened my first company in Haiti, Radio-Tele Heritage. Over the years, I acquired at least 12.9 hectares of land in Haiti, for the sole purpose of opening the Distillery Clairin Bon Gout De Notre Dame, a charcoal producing plant and a purified water plant. In April 2010, I have opened CBG Warehouse, a distributor of alcohol, soft drink and alimentary products.  Through these ventures, I have learned the alcohol market in Haiti, the soft drink business, how to deal with the governmental agencies, the risks facing firms in Haiti, and the overall system and mentality.

Michel DeGraff is a Haitian linguist, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. His field of scholarship is Creole studies. He is known for his advocacy towards the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language. He believes that Haitian children should be taught in their native language at all levels of instruction, contrary to the tradition of teaching them in French. From DeGraff’s perspective, Haitian Creole is a necessary tool for helping Haitian children build strong foundations in order for them to become proficient and creative learners in all academic areas, including non-native languages such as French, English, Spanish, etc. In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a project to develop, evaluate and disseminate digital materials in Haitian Creole for interactive learning of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in Haiti.

It was Haiti’s loss when a young Jean Conille and his family decided to up sticks and move to Canada in search of a better life. They found it. Jean was educated there, entered a juvenile entrepreneur awards programme at the age of just 15 – and started his first successful business there. Over the years his business interests continue to grow until he had a commercial presence not alone in Canada but also in the United States, specifically Miami, and in the Dominican Republic. Why not Haiti? He was a regular visitor, he recalls – but he never really felt Haiti was “open for business”. That attitude changed dramatically, however, when Conille himself experienced the terrible earthquake of 2010 and was moved to think about how he could help rebuild the country. A key problem, he saw, was deforestation, which left the infrastructure badly exposed to violent weather. So Conille founded a new company named Gazel, determined to replace the widespread burning of charcoal for domestic purposes with the use of subsidized propane. Having secured a licence to import it from the Dominican Republic, his twin strategies were to set up a distribution network that would reach the poorest, and then bring to the market affordable propane-burning stoves.The project has been hugely successful. Gazel recently opened its own terminal in Port au Prince. Through its new subsidiary, Autogaz, it’s now focusing on the motor fuel sector, first taxis and “taptaps” and then public transport and private owners, with converter kits already on sale. With huge opportunities still for growth, Conille’s Haitian business already has a staff of 40.

Didier Jean-Baptiste is a Corporate Finance Executive and Management Consultant with international experience in Fortune 500 companies.  Didier possesses 12+ years of experience in Developed and Frontier Markets (Retail, Industrial and Financial Institutions) with specialties in CorporateFinance and Strategic Management.  His main accomplishments are in investments, operations, regulatory compliance and project finance. Didier is currently the Group CFO for the West Indies Group, a Caribbean conglomerate with stakes in diverse industries such as warehousing, Petroleum products storage, port operations, commodities and agri-business.Didier holds a B. Comm in Finance from Concordia University, an MSc in Interntional Business from SherbrookeUniversity as well as an MBA from HEC Montreal.

Steve Cherestal is currently Senior Digital Commerce Operations Manager with experience in Web/Mobile Platforms and IT strategy.  He is a well-rounded IT Professional who has held a variety of positions in the industry.  He has worked mainly with two of the largest technology providers in the world, IBM and SAP where he spent a combined 13 years of his career helping both internal and external customers run their business better through innovation.  Throughout these years, Steve has developed expertise in Consulting, Project Management, Product Management, Go-To-Market and Operations.  Steve holds a Bachelor degree in Information Systems from Concordia University as well as an MBA from HEC Montreal.