Enrique José Garcia

Enrique is the Managing Partner at DignifAI. 

In 2018 I was in the process of selling my share of a brewery I had co-founded in the US. The marathon of conceptualizing, fundraising, building, and running a Consumer Goods business before the age of twenty-eight had provided me with invaluable experiences that have shaped me into the entrepreneurial-minded person I am today. And yet, there was a gaping hole that I had been feeling for many years – a desire to help my country of Venezuela which I had left ten years prior due to its economic, political, and social deterioration since the early 2000s.

I didn’t know how to align my career with this personal goal, but I knew that the private sector would play a vital role in reconstructing Venezuela with the support of a sustainable public sector model. I therefore decided to start a new chapter by studying an MPA program that would help me dive into this new ecosystem, meeti new allies and find new opportunities that would merge business, policy, and impact.

I decided to attend the LSE EMPA program for three reasons. First, as a kid I studied in a British-system school in Caracas and loved it; second, because it was a part-time program that would allow me to start experimenting with new jobs in this new field; and third, because of its strong focus on economic modeling and statistical inference as tools for understanding political economics.

The EMPA propelled me to learn, through academics and networking, about how the public sector operates from the perspectives of different industries, sectors, and countries. Moreover, it was through the LSE Career Center that I found my first job in this new field – a UK based magazine hired me to move to Colombia and write about the country’s economy. It was perfect, and among the topics I would cover would be the Venezuelan migration crisis.

After writing for this magazine for 6 months and spending substantial time at the Colombian-Venezuelan border, I saw first-hand the scale of the migration crisis and the gap in national and international funding going towards the economic integration of the migrant population. In 2020, during the COVD lockdowns, I decided to cofound a social enterprise called DignifAI, which provides work opportunities to Venezuelan migrants and Colombia IDP’s in the border city of Cucuta through Machine Learning Data-Annotation projects. DignifAI has been supported by the WFP, Ashoka, and ISOC foundations, and has collaborated with different Colombian government agencies – all while building a for-profit business that promotes competition, income generation, and growth opportunities and guides displaced individuals to value work as a means of recovering their identities and dignity.

I hope that the lessons I am learning with DignifAI will continue to multiply until the day I am able to apply them towards the reconstruction of Venezuela. I am appreciative of the EMPA experience for empowering me to towards a more fulfilling career that merges business and social impact.

Enrique is happy to conect via LinkedIn.