The 2020 school year came to an end at the Cerrito Agricultural School. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the special situation it represented, 30 (thrity) new rural entrepreneurs graduated this year -13 women and 17 men,- who received their diplomas of Technical Agricultural Baccalaureate and Hospitality & Tourism Baccalaureate, in a ceremony that took place at the headquarters of the institution. Martín Burt, executive director of Fundación Paraguaya, attended the ceremony and congratulated the students for completing the school year by means of their own effort since they learned how to reinvent themselves throughout this year’s difficult situation.

“If education is expensive, try ignorance,” said Martín Burt, coining the phrase of Derek Bok, a professor at Harvard University, during his message to young people, pointing out that ignorance has a much higher cost than education. The students came from towns such as Cerrito, Misiones, Mariano Roque Alonso, Benjamín Aceval, Santaní, San Pedro, Itauguá, Itacurubí de la Cordillera, Areguá, Itá, Capiatá, Chaco, and even from Tarija, Bolivia.

The students, who had virtual classes all year long and did the field work and practices from their homes, submitted business plans as their end-of year final project, and in order to implement them, they received, on average, a credit line of PYG 4,000,000 per graduate from the Fundación Paraguaya

Some were focused on the commercialization of chorizo misionero (missionary sausage), production and commercialization of oat cakes, hotels and rural tourism, production and commercialization of gravy sauce, travel agencies, cinnamon rolls, sweet pastries, customized ecological agendas, ecological pencils, among others. The teaching of the Agricultural School is based on the methodology of “Learning by doing, selling and earning.”