A Project of Think Renewables Group, Inc.
Solar-Powered Small Business Centres Expanding Education and Jobs
ThinkBiz Africa is combining proven solar-powered social businesses with free educational resources in Africa to support education and entrepreneurship, especially for women and girls.
Each SBiz Centre includes at least one profitable social business and free educational information that is made available to the local community and nearby school(s) via Wi-Fi. The profitable social business is expect to be one of the following:
a) Solar-powered convenience store by an experienced manufacturer such as SOLARKIOSK.
b) Solar-powered micro-grid by an experienced micro-grid company such as FlexGrid.
c) Solar-powered cold storage by an experienced cold storage company such as TAGE.
Each of these social businesses has been proven to work and be profitable in many locations in Africa. As a result, we expect these businesses will enable us to provide free educational resources via WiFi on a sustainable basis.
To provide a quick introduction to ThinkBiz Africa, we created a 2.5 minute introductory video and then followed it with our full pitch video. This video is included in this webpage and shows an example SBiz Centre containing a solar-powered convenience store and a micro-grid. As indicated earlier, a SBiz Centre may include other social businesses such as a solar-powered cold storage room.
With each social business, we plan to partner with a company that already operates this type of business in Africa to commission, manage operations and provide some training for our staff. In this way, ThinkBiz Africa can grow quickly and remain focussed on the larger strategy of utilizing self-sustaining social businesses to facilitate education and entrepreneurship, especially for girls and women.
A particular social business would only expand to other SBiz Centres when it makes economic sense to do so. We plan to include one of our Conferencing eStation (CeS) models with each SBiz Centre to facilitate remote monitoring and technical support for each social business that is part of this centre. The CeS will also will be utilized to support education and entrepreneurship in the local community.
You can view our ThinkBiz Africa business profile on the following leading online investment platforms: Gust.com and VentureCapital for Africa (VC4A). We have also provided similar information at the following links:
1) “One Pager” Executive Summary created by Gust.com: Link
2) ThinkBiz Africa Intro Video (2.5 min.) + Full Pitch Deck Video in 3 formats:
a) Special video format (allows viewers to skip slides)
b) Standard video in a webpage or Standard video via Youtube.com
c) Standard PDF format (Pitch Deck Only)
3) SBiz Centre homepage c/w links to more detail: http://thinkrenewables.com/sbiz-centre
