Leading Projects at Enactus INSAT: Building Cactusafe

I joined Enactus almost on a whim in my first year, mostly for interview practice. I wasn't taking it too seriously. Then I met the team and something about the energy stuck before I'd even contributed anything. My first real project there was VarroAway, a patch-based solution for varroa mites, the parasite that quietly wrecks bee colonies. I helped with the business plan, the pitch content, and the video, and we made it to the national expo finals. By the end of that year I knew I wasn't ready to walk away, so I applied for Vice President of Projects.

No playbook, so I wrote one

There wasn't a manual waiting for me when I started the role. Just several new teams, a room full of half-formed ideas, and a job that amounted to turning that into direction. So I built the playbook as I went. Every process question, every "how do we actually structure this," every decision that needed making got written down, tested against reality, and adjusted when it didn't hold up. By the end of the year it had become an actual mandate document for the club, something that started as my answer to not having one.

Beyond the competition result, what I actually wanted was to build an environment where new members got to live the Enactus experience the way I did: the brainstorming, the dead ends, the late nights when a rough idea finally starts looking like something real. Not just chase a result, but make the process mean something for the people going through it.

From five ideas to Cactusafe

We started from zero as a team. Brainstormed until we had five ideas on the table, narrowed to two, then landed on one: Cactusafe, a biopesticide targeting cactus cochineal, the insect quietly destroying cactus crops across Tunisia.

Motivation went up and down a lot that year. Exam deadlines collided with project deadlines more than once, and there were weeks the whole thing felt fragile enough to fold. We kept carrying it forward anyway, and it paid off: we made it through the early stage all the way to the finals, built our MVP along the way, and started distributing samples across more than 7 regions in Tunisia.

None of that happens solo. It exists because of a team of people who trusted a process with no guarantees and showed up for it anyway. That's the part I'm most proud of, honestly, not the result on its own, but that we built it together.

Two very different roles in the same club, and somehow it kept teaching me exactly what I needed at the time.