Kenyan Entrepreneur’s club Metta Nairobi in collaboration with What Design Can Do (WDCD), Social Enterprise NL and IKEA Foundation has inaugurated the Clean Energy Accelerator Program to provide participants with the necessary infrastructures to help them increase the scalability of their innovations.
As part of the program, the startups involved will aim to create their business models and work out ways to move their innovations to the markets. The 4-month program will feature online workshops, a Bootcamp in Amsterdam, expert consultancy, networking events, inspiring talks and peer to peer learning.
The African startup focused Accelerator is kicking off after 6 months of the clean energy global challenge that was hosted in 5 cities: Delhi, Mexico City, Nairobi, São Paulo, and Amsterdam. The global competition which lasted for 7 months between September 2018 to March 2019 was a call on start-ups, designers and students from all over the world to rethink how we produce, distribute and use energy in these cities.
84 projects were submitted from Nairobi for the global challenge from which 2 startups won. According to Techcabal, the winners include Solar Freeze, a one-stop turnkey portable off-grid toolkit for localized food production containing a complete ecosystem of smart farm technologies and Nairobi’s Energy Food nexus which is transforming the Energy-Food nexus through design and innovation for sustainable food systems in Nairobi across all income levels.
Speaking on the launch, the General Manager of Metta Nairobi said, “We are glad to be working with great organizations 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 more safer and sustainable forms of energy. We are happy to bring our global business acceleration experience to the program.”
