Greenskills

Green Skills homepage

Inspiration

We see great challenges in economies transitioning towards sustainability and one of the problems we noticed is the difficulty of entering the sustainability field, with green skills courses being very expensive, especially for people in countries in the global south such as South Africa, where it could take several months to more than a year to save enough money to buy a single green skills course.

What it does

Our solution is a free green skills learning platform for South Africans that will also allow to connect with like minded peers and find jobs.

How and why we built it

Whilst we were gathering the team during the hackathon, one of our team members mentioned some problems he has noticed in South Africa - high unemployment, the difficulty to enter sustainability field due to high costs of courses, lack of South Africa specific courses. After that ,we made the decision to pursue an idea that will help to tackle these issues. We created a mockup with React framework and published it on netlify to illustrate how our solution works. We discussed the idea with mentors who supported us and helped us make the decision to place an emphasis on a specific region, in our case South Africa, and to tailor the solution to that region. Our plan is to be non-profit, and operate mostly off of donations and grants as we believe that high quality education is a right for all.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was coming up with an idea to tackle while we were recruiting team members, but as soon as we finished the recruitment we successfully came up with idea and aside from needing some coaching to make our solution more specific, we had a very smooth time with the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Participating in multiple great workshops. Forming a great team Coming up with solution that could help solve real world problem. Creating Mockup to illustrate how our solution would work. Preparing pitch video.

What we learned

The importance of time spent balancing between empathy to attract audience attention and giving enough time for the solution. Emphasizing the Why? Understanding its importance in helping people relate to the problem

What's next for Greenskills

Should we win we plan to perhaps apply for funding to make our solution a reality. We would need to do further market research and consult with the relevant bodies for a further feasibility analysis.