New York, New York

One week in the Big Apple makes magic happen. During a one week stay the team had the chance to arrange meetings with several interesting actors in the social impact investment scene. Our team was specially happy to meet with the Global Social Investment Funds team at Deutche Bank. Having the opportunity to present our business case for this team that is about to setup a groundbreaking new social impact investment fund was very inspiring. That Deutche Bank is operating in novel manners on Wall Street makes one even more excited. We’d be happy to collaborate in the future when our proof of concept is up and running.

Addtinionally, our team met with the excellent Willow Impact Investors. This meeting was likewise very motivating. I am very pleased to find investors out there that share our values and this make me very excited about the future. Read more

Great Challenges Berlin

In January our team participated in a program called Great Challenges Berlin, which brought us  to Berlin to get to know more about the local startup business scene.  It was basically  a chance for networking for entrepreneurs who is working on solutions of  a variety of  global social problems such as hygiene, environmental or water shortage.

During our stay we got the chance to work at the local creative co-working space Betahaus in Kreutzberg and hanging out here and meeting with other locla entrepreneurs was definately one of the better parts of the trip.  We also visited the Social Impact Lab, a center for social entrepreneurship in Berlin. Social Impact Lab works closely with SAP and the majority of the startup projects they engage in is IT focused. Read more

Happy New Year 2012

Let’s hope it is a good one. We’d like to thank all our friends and partners for an exciting and wonderful year with you. We are more passionate than ever to work for our dreams to come true and make this world a little bit more sustainable step by step. We are looking forward to work with you on new challenges and to learn from more adventures together.

New year greetings!

Pamoja Cleantech team

Swedish Innovation Awards

Pamoja Cleantech was awarded a prize in the academic category of the Swedish Innovation Award. The jury’s justification for the prize reads:

“What began as an innovation project in the Swedish university environment is now a for-profit social enterprise network in Africa and Asia. We are impressed with the high level of innovation, commitment and a novel approach in spreading of an idea which contributes to sustainable growth in developing countries. ”

The jury consisted of Lena Torell-Treschow, IVA, Chairman, Anders Snell, Billerud, Charlotte Brogren, Vinnova, Jonas Wiström, ÅF, Ulf Lindberg Almega, Pontus Schultz, The Week’s Business and Jill Bederoff, The Week’s Business.

The main category award was won by the fastgrowing mobile VoIP provider Rebtel. “In a short time Rebtel have built up a brand known around the world, built on industry-leading innovation in technology and business model. Above all, it was shown that a fast growing user base can translate into profits in the company. ”

Read more

Innovations Against Poverty

Since a while ago our team has been busy preparing for an upcoming field visit in the beginning of 2012. This was due to some good news – Pamoja team was awarded a grant in the SIDA Innovations Against Poverty and we will execute a business study to explore the potential of deploying our renewable energy solution at a pilot site.

Just recently we have been working to leverage best potential from the business study. Co-ordinating a multi-stakeholder process and aligning goals with several partners has taken its time. We are now on good direction and expect to be signing agreements in near future!

Branching out for a Green Economy – work in progress

Here is a peak into the ordinary Pamoja start up life. Moments of sweat, tears and lots of fun. To spot us live you find us hiding in our office space at the Stockholm University, attending seminars at Aalto Venture Garage or brainstorming ideas at the local sandbox. See you around!

The good news keeps coming

Ever since month of May good news from the field has kept us super motivated to push forward. During  May our Stockholm team was busy preparing an application for the Innovations Against Poverty Programme initiated by SIDA. This work was a great process. We managed to communicate our systematic approach to rural electrification in a most simple and clear way. We learnt surprisingly lot from this and I think we discovered many new aspects of our innovation.

Simultaneously, a team of engineers have been touring East Africa with a mission to find a suitable pilot site for our first on site operations.  This activity on the ground has paid off in new interesting partnerships and increased knowledge of course.  We will disclose some amazing news in the near future, please stay tuned.

Mt. Kenya

The Pamoja Research team from Royal Institute of Technology and Aalto University is actively traveling and getting to know East Africa. Recent report from John, Irena and Federico tells us the story from their trip to Mount Kenya.

Since the early days of planning the trip to East-Africa we were sure that we wanted to go hiking. The first option was Kilimanjaro, but since it seemed to be a lot more expensive, due to the distance from Nairobi and more hiking days. So we ended up choosing the second highest mountain in Africa, Mt. Kenya for our destination. The route we took was Sirimon- Point Lenana- Naro Moru.

Read more

International team, global opportunities

Pamoja Team

Since last update the team has been busy at many levels. There are 17 people involved in the project and we are gaining momentum. We have  a team focusing on design and product development. This work is quite fascinating and attracts a lot of interest, in a few months time we will have what we call the Green Plant ready and running – our hybrid renewable energy micro powerplant.

Me and Felix has also been active negotiating and promoting our idea at the Social Entrepreneurship Forum and the Swedish East African Chamber of Commerce. Read more

Launching the website

We are proud to present our new design and start page: www.pamojacleantech.com

new pamoja website

Thanks to www.kmh-design.de.

//Felix