Lucía Valencia-Dongo

"This young graduate in Business Administration from the University of the Pacific (Peru) is the inventor of DUHEM, a virtual collective financing platform for social and environmental projects and an interactive space for the community of buyers who are sensitive to the decisions they make with each purchase.

In order to foster a movement for change that promotes a responsible and healthy lifestyle among young people through responsible purchasing in Peru, Lucia Valencia founded DUHEM: “Leave a Footprint on the World” (“Deja Una Huella en el Mundo” in Spanish).

This online store offers a variety of more than 2,000 products distributed by more than 40 different brands. Each one of them represents an important social initiative, e.g. education, health, sustainability and human rights, and is backed either by an NGO or by a community of small entrepreneurs who are given the opportunity to expand their market.

DUHEM´s strategy is to use the social component implicit in the act of making a purchase to engage the consumer in a humanitarian movement, mediated by social networks and by a set of gamification tools hosted by their platform. DUHEM was one of the projects selected by Wyra Peru in 2012. Since then it has received more than 30.000 recurring visitors from 73 countries, it has teamed up with five international NGO and it continues to incorporate new socially-committed brands."