To everyone reading this, whether you're already part of the SABF ecosystem or just discovering it for the first time —welcome! We’re glad to have you here—, we want to open this article with a confession. Time after time, each SABF organizer faces the same challenge: how to define the South American Business Forum.
The easiest answer, the one that rolls off the tip of the tongue, is that SABF is an international conference. If you study at our university, you might find it more natural to think of SABF as a student organization made up of highly enthusiastic students running on very little sleep. But there's another definition that often goes unnoticed, and yet rings true to everyone who has ever been part of SABF: it's a community.
Now, for some context. Every year, 22 students from Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires organize a three-day conference with its own narrative arc: pressing issues are raised in plenary sessions, explored further through workshops and debates, and then participants leave with concrete ideas and the connections needed to take action together.
And who takes part in this event? We have the privilege of welcoming 100 brilliant university students from different fields and countries. Our speakers, meanwhile, are global leaders who bring pieces of wisdom from their respective fields, with the specific mission of inspiring the next generation of changemakers. Some of the speakers we’ve hosted in previous editions include Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab; Alejandro Vazquez, founder of Tiendanube; Jon "maddog" Hall, Executive Director of Linux International; Yeshimabeit Milner, founder and Executive Director of Data for Black Lives; Renee Hobbs, expert in media literacy.
As you can see, every person involved is a unique and necessary piece in the engineering of each edition. That's why SABF is polysemous, multifaceted, and escapes the confines of any logical explanation. It has to be experienced to be fully understood. We stay in close touch with those who already have, and we can confirm that, years later, they still talk about those three days in Buenos Aires as a turning point in their lives. (Stay tuned — stories from last year’s participants are coming soon.)
Some common occurrences among SABF participants:
- Traveling to another continent and grabbing a coffee with that local participant you met at the conference.
- Redirecting your career path after a mentorship session with a leading figure in your field.
- Making the connection that gives the final push to the project you'd been building.
- Falling in love with Buenos Aires, if you’d never been here before.
- Going home with countless memories, new friends, and the slightly unsettling (though welcome) feeling that everything you thought you had figured out deserves to be reconsidered.
Perhaps, while reading this, you pictured someone in this setting — a friend, a coworker, a younger sibling, a student. Or perhaps that person is you. Either way, SABF is waiting for you. Until April 11 at 9:00 AM (GMT-3), applications are open to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as recent graduates from 2025 or 2026, born on or after January 1, 2000.
As for us, we are eager to meet the protagonists of this new edition. We hope you will be one of them.
