JA Tanzania organized a GREENT Green Entrepreneurs Program for Tanzanian teachers, in partnership with JA Bulgaria. GREENT is an innovative, collaboratively-created set of tools that inspires and supports teachers to deliver lessons on the topic of green entrepreneurship to their students in an interactive and practical way. The program fosters the creation of young green entrepreneurs on the African continent, giving them practical skills on how to develop their sustainable business ideas through learning-by-doing approaches which are part of JA’s core educational paradigm.
Over the course of one week, 44 Tanzanian teachers from 17 schools in Dar es Salaam and from Iringa province underwent the program. The trainers on the program, Vera Petkanchin and Apostle Djankov, who are staff of JA Bulgaria, taught participants how to implement the GREENT Green Entrepreneurship Program as a tool to address local environmental and social issues. These include generating business solutions for recycling household and plastic waste, producing clean food for schools, saving resources and generating renewable energy. Participants were also trained on some global challenges such as climate change and deforestation.
JA Bulgaria hopes to bring the experiences and best practices from implementing the program in Europe to Africa. “It took us several months to prepare and adapt our GREENT program to the context of East Africa. Most of the business solutions we show are made by local entrepreneurs,” said Apostle Djankov.” “The economic dynamism in Tanzania is huge and the whole continent seems to be following its own unique path of development, building on the incredible social capital and support from the local community that everyone can access here,” added Vera Petkanchin.
According to a 2017 report by the New Climate Economy, policies that encourage sustainable growth and entrepreneurship have the potential to ignite a green industrial revolution in Africa. Transformative economic and ‘green growth’ policies, combined with entrepreneurship, could enable Africa to ‘leap frog’ to a clean, resource-efficient modern economy.
The program was funded by JA Worldwide, through JA Labs, a grant fund provided by Citi Foundation.
