Too Good To Go

Too Good To Go

par | Fév 27, 2018 | Circular Economy / Tech, Food, Responsible Consumption, Web design

Too Good To Go

SOLUTION

Too Good To Go is an app which uses a geo-targeted map to show users the restaurants closest to them with leftover food available for collection at special time, at great price.   

BUSINESS MODEL

Product sale - For Profit

Too Good To Go sells food that they buy from the stores at a great price. Stores make extra cash on food that would have otherwise cost them to throw out.   Customers win by getting a great value meal – collecting tasty food at a reduced price.

There is the option for the user to donate £1 alongside his purchase, which will go towards providing a meal to someone who needs it.

IMPACT

Place: 15 European countries, expanding to the US

Scale:  over 58 million meals have been rescued since 2016.  

Every year, 1/3 of all food produced is wasted. If this food waste were a country it would be the third largest emitter of CO2 – only behind the USA and China! 

ORIGINS

Jammie Crumie met his co-founder, Chris, at university in 2010. « We had a lightbulb moment when in Denmark – the amount of food that is wasted in the UK (estimated to be around fifteen million tonnes per year) and the number of people who have to visit foodbanks to survive are two massive issues. The two can clearly be linked, yet nothing seems to have been done about it. »

Convincing restaurateurs to change their long-established processes was a real barrier to the launch of Too Good To Go. Chris and Jamie spent months unsuccessfully knocking on doors of restaurants, cafes and bakeries all over London for months on end with only the bare bones of a website. « But after drumming up some interest we decided to move up from a website to an app and join forces with a group of Danish guys who were in the early stages of creating an app. »  The app was launched in 2015.

WHAT’S NEXT?

  • In 2 years, they’ve partnered with over 5,000 stores to fight food waste. 3 million people have downloaded the app. 
  • They are also in the process of recruiting volunteers who will collect the leftover food from the participating restaurants and deliver it to shelters, hostels and refuge centres. « We definitely want to develop an even more charitable side to the app, which will involve working alongside charities and foodbanks to get meals for those in need » explains the co-founder, Jamie Crummie

GET INVOLVED !

Get the app

If you’re living in one of the countries where the app is available (Danmark, UK, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland), start rescuing some cheap and delicious meals from today!
Download

Work for them

If you believe in a world where food produced equals food consumed  and your profile matches one of their many openings – the startup is growing fast! – apply today!
Openings

Get in touch

You want to get in touch to partner with their team in another way, get in touch here.

 

Contact

Alison

Alison

par | Déc 27, 2017 | Education, Free education / Tech, Web design

Alison

SOLUTION

Alison currently offers over 1000+ online courses across certificate and diploma level.

 

BUSINESS MODEL

Advertising - Non Profit

Alison is a MOOC (Massive open online courses). It  invites publishers to share courses on the platform. It makes money through advertising (on their website), merchandise (T-shirt) and the sale of Certificates and Diplomas, should a graduate choose to buy one. Cost is highly reduced compared to usual schools (cost of building, staff…). Through the online pay per click advertising revenue model, Alison has founded a business model whereby ‘learners in the developed countries are essentially paying for those in developing countries’ while providing the learning materials for free.

IMPACT

Place: global

Scale: 11 million learners, 1.5 million graduates (2017)

Depth: 

  • Gained skills 

ORIGINS

Alison (Advanced Learning Interactive Systems Online) was founded in Galway in 2007. Mike Feerick is a serial social entrepreneur, Ashoka Fellow, and Harvard MBA who has previously created successful internet-based companies in telecoms and finance as well as online education, has had the challenges of accessing education imprinted on him from an early age. Mike’s insights with ALISON, a free online certification program, draws from his extensive experience working in e-learning, primarily through a company he founded called Advance Learning, which offered per diem online curriculum. On a gamble, he took the US$1M worth of Advance Learning content and made it free online.

GET INVOLVED !

Work for them

Alison.com have all sort of expertise needs. Wherever you are from, if you have top level skills in your field, they would love to hear from you.

Career page

The Global Citizen

The Global Citizen

par | Déc 27, 2017 | Global Citizenship

The Global Citizen

SERVICE

Organization of academic co-curricular programs such as camps and debate to provide students to teach students about important global issues (environmental preservation, social justice, law, polics, public health) and skills like public speaking, persuasive oratory, diplomacy techniques, independent learning methods, research, writing and many more.  The Global Citizen also offers public speaking workshops, coding classes, as well as interview and university admission preparation courses through its subsidiary company the Impressionist. 

BUSINESS MODEL

Service Subsidization Model - For Profit

The Global Citizen programs charge students with competitive fees relevant to the originating region of the participant.  

IMPACT

Place: East Asia 

Scale:  more than a dozen schools and 30 to 100 participants in each camps

Depth: 

  • Foster a strong sense of global consciousness in the leaders of tomorrow, nurture global citizens who will make positive contributions to the community around them and innovate the world they live in 

ORIGINS

After six years of debating, Walter Yeo tried to find work as a debate coach, but was surprised to find the jobs filled by insurance agents and fitness trainers.

« A lot of them weren’t debaters themselves and didn’t know much about debate. Yet, they believed that they could teach it because they had experience in speaking to members of the public, » he said.

From his encounter, the 25-year-old realised that schools lacked qualified debate coaches. Together with his friend Jared Yeo, 26,  he started The Global Citizen (TGC), a Singapore-based education provider, in December 2015 to address this shortage.

Together, they have conquered conferences around the world, bagging numerous prizes along the way such as the coveted Best Diplomacy Award at Harvard World Model United Nations 2015 and organized ground-breaking local events like Policies Not Platitutes: A #GE2015 Policy Forum – the first ever multi-party General Elections dialogue held at the National University of Singapore.

WHAT’S NEXT?

  • The Global Citizen is trying to develop a stronger global presence. It hopes to become a hub in South-east Asia for niche academic co-curricular activities within the next five years.

GET INVOLVED !

As a Student

Interested to participate to one of the camps or public speaking programs offered by The Global Citizen?

See Programs

Work for them

Interested to work for The Global Citizen? The social enterprise is looking for mentors, coaches tutors and more.

Careers

Start Your Own!

Got inspired to create a similar business in a different part of the world or for another collaboration? Contact them for more insights!

Contact

Common Service Centers (CSC)

Common Service Centers (CSC)

par | Déc 10, 2017 | EqualOpportunities

Common Services Centers (CSC)

SERVICE

Physical facilities for delivering Government e-Services to rural and remote locations where availability of computers and Internet is negligible or mostly absent. Services provided are essential public utility services, social welfare schemes, healthcare, financial, education and agriculture services. For example, they can book railway tickets online or pay their electricity bill online through these facilities.  Some facilities also provide banking services, and  training to make rural people digitally literate.

BUSINESS MODEL

Franchise - For Profit

CSCs are set up in a public-private partnership model, with a designated state agency being a franchisor of sorts for village level entrepreneurs (VLEs) to set up centres. The VLEs must meet a set of minimum requirements. They must also make arrangements for infrastructure (a room with two personal computers and two printers).  VLEs usually record 5,000 to 8,000 transactions per months.

IMPACT

Place: India

Scale:  270,000 centres in India (December 2017), 8.27 million people have been trained to become digitally literate and 5.3 million people have been certified (October 2017).

Depth: 

  • Having access to computer and digital services improves the life of rural population. 

ORIGINS

The concept of CSCs was approved in 2006 as part of the National e-Governance Plan. It’s part of the vision of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, of “Digital India”, to make one person in every family digitally literate.

WHAT’S NEXT?

  • CSCs have now their own ecosystem and have been growing very quickly. It reached 200,000 centers in december 2016 and 270,000 centres in 2017.
  • The plan is to make 60 million rural households digitally literate by March 2019.

Maya Apa

Maya Apa

par | Déc 10, 2017 | Big Data, Free education / Tech, Free Medical Care, Web design, Women Empowerment / Tech

Maya Apa

SOLUTION

Maya Apa is a virtual platform that anyone anonymously can access any time, providing counselling and answers to queries on daily life issues including health, psychosocial and legal matters.
Once a question is asked, it is redirected to the profile of relevant experts and the answer appears within a maximum of three hours.

BUSINESS MODEL

Freemium / Data - For Profit

A premium service titled ‘Maya Apa Plus’ has been launched under partnership with mobile operator Robi. Users will have their queries answered in ten minutes through this service.  Users can subscribe for BEST 60 (60 eurocents) a month for unlimited questions. For SMS-based questions, they only charge BDT 10  once a user gets a resolution to their initial query, which is still cheaper than a consultation.

Maya Apa gathers  heaps of anonymous data and can tell what kind of problems are prevalent in which area, what age group is more prone to mental problems and all these issues. Which means looking at Maya data, you can understand health and legal status of many localities. This data has the potential to be monetized in the future.

Experts are paid based on answers. Through technologies like natural language processing, Maya Apa can route questions to the right expert. They have a training module and a separate website for the experts. Before onboarding any expert, they take them through test and training. Once they pass the test and finish their training and get vetted, they then approve them and they get access to the dashboard.

IMPACT

Place: Bangladesh 

Scale:  150,000 queries were submitted and answered. Over 10,000 users access it daily (2017).

Depth: 

  • 75% of  queries are health related, 20% are psychosocial and rest 5% are legal questions. In Bangladesh, doctor to patient ratio is 4000:1 and psychiatrist to patient ratio is 1: 1 million, there is a huge need for both of these services.

ORIGINS

Maya Apa was founded in 2011 by Ivy Russell. « When I started Maya, I had little idea of what we wanted to do. I was juggling a full-time job and writing articles and publishing them to my site, maya.com.bd, which was more like a blog at the time. It was very difficult to navigate through the whole thing.

The question I originally asked when I started Maya was: where do women go when they need to ask questions about the intimate parts of their body? Although that was a basic question and the starting point for us but I really started diving deep when I left my job in 2014. That’s when I started reading about and understanding major trends and ideas and changes in the tech landscape across the world. And we decided to move from a mere website and pivoted to mobile and messaging from a web based content site. And we also turned Maya into a predominantly Bangla platform. It was at this point we were fortunate to receive a grant from BRAC to support our transformation from content portal to a mobile-first, Bangla-first wellbeing service ».

WHAT’S NEXT?

  • « During the early days of Maya, I was the only person doing everything with the help of a couple of doctors who helped out voluntarily and I am super grateful to them. It took us almost 48 hours to answer any question in an appropriate manner. Then it became 24 hours and then 12 hours and for the last couple of years it came down to 3 hours and now premium users are getting it in 10 minutes. We just launched our premium service, Maya Apa Plus, in partnership with Robi, the selling point is ‘get your answer in 10 minutes’.« 
  • « Over the past couple of years, we have tried many different things. We failed in some and some of those things have stuck with us and are helping us to grow.« 
  • In February 2017, BRAC has decided to increase its investment to scale the service.  In addition, Brac’s urban development programme will implement a pilot project where the Maya Apa app will be used to give services to 50,000 women working in garments factories.
  • « We have kicked off our monetization side with doing the deal with Robi .After our collaboration with Robi, 600 more questions got added per day. On a good day, we receive around 1000 messages and on a bad day, we receive around 500 messages. That’s just the beginning. We plan to get into more partnerships in the coming days. We are in an exclusive partnership with Robi for one year. We plan to package differently for other partners. »
  • « We also plan to move on to other markets. We have done research in India, perhaps we will start with Calcutta and the Middle East is also our target but nothing is finalized yet. Since we have BRAC as a partner, we may launch in countries where BRAC has operations and where there is a need for our service« .
  • « We are also in talk with a couple of private companies who want to avail our service for their employees. Our B2B service is about to start.The company launched LenddoScore, a proprietary credit rating system without any traditional banking inputs in October 2013. »

GET INVOLVED !

Work for them

Maya Apa is located in Bengladesh. They are looking for medical and psychology specialists, as well as other profiles to grow the enterprise.

Career page