The Alliance for Green Entrepreneurship project is moving forward swiftly. We’re proud to have completed an international report on green entrepreneurship and best practices in the European Union, especially focused on partner countries: Bulgaria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Greece, Poland, and Romania.
This report is an accumulation of the consortium’s research in their own countries and it is the first step towards our overall goal – an Open-End Resource platform with training on green entrepreneurship. It also covers information on legislation in partner countries, methodologies used to implement green models into the economy, and best practices of each country.
For example, did you know there is a program that allows Bulgarian students to attend an eco-camp and funds their green business ideas? It’s a collaborative project with Norway called Junior Achievement, and after passing the first selection phase in schools, the best students are awarded with a visit to an eco camp, where they apply hands-on the theoretical knowledge gained at school. The highlight of the camp program is participants coming up with a solution to an ecological problem with funding for the best ideas.
Another example is an app developed by a Polish start-up that forecasts the air pollution in cities. Airly is a mobile app made by freshly-graduated engineers who were tired of the smog in their city of Kraków. They came up with cheap and easy-to-install sensors that calculate the level of smog in the air. These sensors are now dotted in cities all over Europe and beyond.
In the Netherlands students take care of the level of ecology in their schools. Eco-schools is a program for schools where sustainability is given a permanent place in education, in the infrastructure and the surrounding environment. Students, in Eco teams, lead the sustainability tasks and carry out actions. In this way, schools can earn the green flag and a United Nations-recognized quality mark for sustainable schools, motivating them further to upkeep that same eco-friendly mindset.
All this information and practices are helping us towards the development of the next project aim: content creation for our end-goal training programme.
