Adolfo Agundez Rodriguez

After earning a bachelor's degree in biology at the _Universidad Autónoma de Madrid_ (Spain), Adolfo Agundez Rodriguez moved to the city of Cochabamba (Bolivia) from 1993 to 1999, lured by the desire to learn new ways of seeing life and the urge to share the reality of the impoversished. Taking up the cause of society's rejects is, in his words, "my main commitment as a citizen, besides my commitment as the father of three children who fill my life with childhood - that is, with wisdom, joy, magic and dreams." These commitments continue to guide his work as an educator, a consumer education researcher, and a writer in Bolivia, Spain and Canada, where he has lived for the past eight years.

As an educator, Adolfo Agundez Rodriguez has worked in both formal and informal settings, in a variety of educational projects and schools in Spain and Bolivia. His achievements include pedagogical work for the Yachay Tinkuy project, which trains teachers in rural and urban areas of Cochabamba province. He was also the co-founder and manager of the educational wing of CAIC, an organization in charge of education, nutrition and health care for the over 200 children who live with their parents in the Cochabamba prison.

His commitment to education led him to complete a degree in pedagogy at the Spain's distance-education university, UNED, and he followed this with a master's at the Université de Sherbrooke. His graduate research examined consumer education, a theme he is pursuing now at the doctoral level. The results of his four years of research have been recognized in several professional and learned publications, and earned the Acfas-Desjardins award in the doctoral research category.

Over the last ten years, Adolfo Agundez Rodriguez also developed a career as a writer. Several of his stories and his second novel have won awards in Spain. His work as a writer is directly related to his doctoral research, as the goal of the research is to develop stories about consumption for elementary school children and to evaluate their potential as teaching material.