UNESCO and ET Cube hold first Pacific bootcamp on entrepreneurship for

Over three days, the five teams worked on their design for a product reflecting Pacific development priorities. For instance, the Photo Cleantech team from Papua New Guinea and Kiribati came up with a low-cost, renewable cathode rod which would use sunlight to purify water supplies in remote communities.

The six members of the SolCool team designed a chilly bin powered by a solar panel to tackle the challenge stressed by fishers they surveyed in their family circle, who spoke of having to choose between losing up to 40% of their fish catch to bacterial contamination before it could be sold and having to purchase ice daily at a cost of about FJD 30 to keep the fish fresh. The SolCool team came from Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Papua New Guinea.

The Smartbin team designed an incentive scheme to convince buyers to dispose of their used plastic water bottles in Smartbins tracked by their imaginary company’s app through a system of bar codes. The five members of this team came from Fiji. 

The Vital Pacific team proposed digitizing hospital medical records to improve patient care, in a country where about 80% of public health facilities in Fiji lack an electronic system for medical records, according to official statistics. This five-member team came from Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu.

The Ecosort team pitched their idea of an articulated waste sorting machine, after telling the jury posing as business angels that just 0.2% of waste in Fiji was currently recycled. The five young engineers in this team all came from Fiji.

The trainees were all either studying or teaching at the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands National University, the University of the South Pacific, the Fiji National University or the University of Fiji.

On the last day of the bootcamp, the five teams pitched their innovative ideas to a jury posing as potential investors. The jury was composed of Susan Schneegans, Science Programme Specialist in the UNESCO Pacific Office; Joe Niemala from UNESCO’s Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy; Aniruddh Kolekar, CEO of the Fijian start-up Paradise Group; Louis Newton from the New Zealand accelerator Pacific Channel; and Jonnie Haddon from the Fiji Innovation Hub. 

The Hon. Navin Raj, Permanent Secretary of Education of Fiji, presided over the 10-minute pitches by the competing teams on the last day of the bootcamp. Before announcing the winner and awarding the UNESCO prize, he assured the contestants that ‘all of you are winners. I have seen a lot of potential and a lot of inspiration’.

However, every competition has to have a winner. After deliberating, the jury awarded the prize for the best business pitch to the team presenting Ecosort, an automated waste sorting machine.