Mettā Nairobi in partnership with What Design Can Do (WDCD), Social Enterprise NL and IKEA Foundation has kicked off the Clean Energy Accelerator Programme.
The Accelerator, which commences from April to July 2019, aims to give the winners the tools to make their innovation ready for market and financing. During the programme, start-ups will focus on developing their social business model and bringing their innovation to market by themselves. The four-month programme includes online workshops, a Bootcamp in Amsterdam, expert consultancy, networking events, inspiring talks and peer to peer learning.
The Accelerator commences after six months of the clean energy global challenge that was hosted in Delhi, Mexico City, Nairobi, São Paulo and Amsterdam. The global competition which took place between September 2018 to March 2019 was a call on start-ups, designers and students from all over the world to rethink how energy is produced, distributed and used in these cities.
The global challenge received 84 projects from Nairobi that resulted in two startup winners.
The winners include:
- Solar Freeze: A one-stop turnkey portable off-grid toolkit for localised food production containing a complete ecosystem of smart farm technologies.
- Nairobi’s Energy Food nexus: Transforming the Energy-Food nexus through design and innovation for sustainable food systems in Nairobi across all income levels.
“We are glad to be working with great organisations such as What Design Can Do, Social enterprise NL, UN-Habitat and IKEA foundation. The topic of clean energy is very timely could not have come at a better time when the world governments are looking to safer and sustainable forms of energy. We are happy to bring our global business acceleration experience to the programme,” says Maurice Otieno, General Manager, Mettā Nairobi.
