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Starter Kit collection

Business case

Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

Contribution to social parity, or impact on social disparity

Equality

Efficiency gains on operations or transactions either through cultural or technological shifts

Productivity

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Minimise waste through diversion: Instead of sending waste to landfill, it is redirected into other industrial processes for handling, treatment, recycling, recovery, or reuse in various forms. 

Minimise waste through design: At the outset of a process of project, plan and design such that there is zero waste or minimal waste during production, use, and at end of life. 

Minimise Waste (SDG12)

Reduced use of fossil fuel energy sources and/or increased use of renewable energy

Reduce Energy Consumption

Providing air, water, rail, and land transportation for passengers, such as airlines, airports, ferries, cruise-ships, tour boat operators, marine ports, railways, train stations, tour bus operators, vehicle rental, and taxi companies, travel agencies and related services

Passenger Transport Services

Producing transportation equipment for the movement of goods and people by air, rail, sea, and land, including airplanes, spacecraft and military equipment, ships, boats, rail locomotives and rolling stock, motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers, and related equipment, as well as repair services for such equipment

Transportation Equipment

Utilise waste streams as a source of secondary resources and recover waste for reuse and recycling

Use waste as a resource

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle waste streams within the same industry

Valorise waste streams - closed loop

Collection programmes that process products and parts for reuse or recycling within the same industry

Closed loop collection

Cycle strategies aim to cycle and reuse materials at their highest value: they maximise the volume of secondary materials re-entering the economy, ultimately minimising the need for virgin material inputs and therefore also narrowing flows. Of course, virgin materials will always be needed to a degree: all materials degrade and can’t be cycled infinitely, use energy, and require blending with virgin materials to maintain strength and functionality.

Cycle

Impacts

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Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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 ABOUT US Mobility for Africa, a start up registered in Zimbabwe under parent company Locomotion for Africa and in Australia, is working with social impact investors, to build a market, using a social enterprise model that provides a package of services from skills to low income financing. 
Robust, renewable energy charged electric tricycles, branded and backstopped by trained community support services, can provide an avenue for communities to overcome these distances and contribute to dynamic local economies. Powered through community based off grid energy supply, e-tricycles could provide the incentive for increased economic activity, creating new local markets and enhancing rural livelihoods. 
A pilot targeting small scale farmers is building the evidence to usage, financial sustainability, technology, including renewable and GPS, and the social and economic impact on households. 
OUR VISION
To bring clean energy solar powered electric transport solutions to women and their families that are affordable, efficient and adapted to peri urban and rural areas in Africa.

By doing so to empower rural women in Africa with transport that can help them save time, better sell their goods at the market, take their children to the clinic and school, collect water, as well as improve their economic opportunities within the households and local communities.
To contribute to improving the quality of life of women and their families.
To contribute to expanding renewal energy for transport in Africa contributing to longer term sustainability and mitigating climate change.

OUR MISSION
To create renewable community-based transport solutions for Africa that is affordable, efficient and environmentally friendly. By building a model that reinforces and builds local distribution networks, seeks to change behavior and empower women, and works on a sustainability model that also creates shared economies, Mobility for Africa will create new opportunities and improve the quality of life for rural communities.


 A lot of startups pop up from time to time with the “Next Big Thing” or the next big service offering in EVs. Most of the time they will be hyping some futuristic and to some extent, mythical new six-figure price tagged EV packed with all the “Bells and Whistles” that promises to do 0 to 100 km/h in under 2 seconds! Sometimes we wonder why more people aren’t looking into some more practical solutions to everyday problems like an EV for ordinary people and not some futuristic vaporware some startups promise in perpetuity. People just want to be able to get about safely and efficiently!
Women in Wedza, Zimbabwe Walking to collect firewood. Image courtesy of Mobility For Africa
To be honest, at this stage 10 years after the first mass produced EV of the modern era, the Nissan Leaf, we just need more and more practical EVs that are widely available. High performance EVs have their place. We are not against people pushing the limits to improve tech. We would just love to see more EVs and mobility as a service firms that are focused on addressing some real life problems and transforming peoples lives where it matters most.
The lives of most rural women and their families have not changed much over the last couple of decades. The women and children still walk long distances to just about everywhere they need to get to. The women walk daily to collect firewood for cooking and heating, water from a well or the nearest river, the nearest clinic, the nearest bus stop to get to the nearest town, and they also walk some distance carrying heavy loads on their heads to take their produce to the market. They often have to make several trips or lose a huge chunk of their perishable produce as they cannot carry a lot of it to the market. The children aren’t spared either, they sometimes walk several km to and from school. The hours wasted mean the communities miss out on many potential economic and self-development opportunities.
Mobility For Africa’s Hamba Electric Three-Wheelers in Wedza, Zimbabwe. Image courtesy of Mobility For Africa
Some startups are now working to address some of these problems. We recently found Mobility For Africa (MFA). MFA is a startup founded by Australian Shantha Bloemen and is currently piloting electric three-wheelers in the rural Wedza district of Zimbabwe. MFA’s vision is to “bring solar powered electric transport solutions to women and their families that are affordable, efficient and adapted to peri urban and rural areas in Africa.” As it executes its mission, MFA aims to “empower rural women in Africa with transport solutions that can help them save time, sell more of their goods at the market, take their children to the clinic, to school, to collect water, as well as improve their economic opportunities within the households and local communities.” Its ultimate goal is to improve the quality of life of women and their families and at the same time “contribute to expanding renewable energy for transport in Africa contributing to longer term sustainability and mitigating climate change.”
MFA has partnered with Tsinghua University in China, Midlands State University in Gweru, Zimbabwe, and The Solar Shack to set up the pilot and create the data system to measure results from the pilot programs. MFA has also set up an assembly plant in Harare’s industrial zone. By choosing to bring in semi-knocked down kits from China and assembling the electric tricycle in Harare, MFA will create some good job opportunities and technology transfer programs in Zimbabwe’s current economic environment where unemployment is at an all-time high. MFA has also developed training and operation manuals for its Electric Lady Agents. MFA also facilitates driving lessons & testing for competency for users that also include a driving manual and battery charging guidelines. The manuals are available in both English and local language versions.
The electric tricycle is known as the Hamba, which means “go” in the local languages. Working with its technical partners, the company has used the lessons learnt in the first phase of the pilot to make improvements and modify the original Chinese tricycle to make it more suitable to rural African conditions. The use of solar charging hubs in such rural setups is critical, as most of the time these villages are far from the grid. The synergies between the solar hubs and the electric vehicles will help propel both the distributed solar microgrid and the electric vehicle sectors in this part of the world. The solar hubs will allow battery charging and or battery swapping stations to be set up at multiple locations, which in turn will encourage adoption of electric vehicles. Typical EVs utilized in these villages  may be in the form of two-wheelers, three-wheelers, and low range affordable electric cars and lorries.
MFA plans to roll out a pay-as-you-go system (PayGo). The PayGo system is well understood in rural Africa since the wave of small home solar systems provided by the likes of M-Kopa swept across Sub-Saharan Africa. During this trial phase, MFA has started with a monthly and daily rental system and hope to prove that the women can pay. Armed with this data, it hopes to raise the capital to allow it to provide longer term financing options.
MFA has successfully raised some funds through a crowdsourcing campaign that allowed it to ship the first container of tricycles and get the pilot program going. MFA has also won a grant from the Live Expo Innovation Grant and also secured a grant from the Africa Energy Competition Fund. MFA has recently secured a partnership with a German second-life battery company, betteries, to test out second-life lithium batteries for the Hamba. MFA hopes Zimbabwe will be a local base for assembly and distribution of its products across Africa. We hope it will be able to find more funding partners to enable it to quickly roll out the commercial phase of the project. After that the company would have a very nice template to simply cut and paste across many African nations.
Related Story: All Electric Taxi-Hailing Service Nopia Looks To Scale Up In Kenya
Take a look at another EV YouTube video by Electric Drive Africa
All images courtesy of Mobility For Africa
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By MacDonald DzirutweWEDZA, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - In the rural Zimbabwe district of Wedza, a new electric-powered motorcycle is helping bring income to poor women and easing the burden of looking after families.The three-wheeler, known as Hamba (Go), powered by a solar-charged lithium ion battery, is being piloted by start-up Mobility for Africa, which leases the motorcycle to women in groups of up to five.The women can now carry farm produce to markets further away from home, offer transportation services to villagers and use the motorcycle for domestic chores.Mary Mhuka, a 58-year-old mother-of-six who is leasing the Hamba with her daughter-in-law and a neighbour, said the motorcycle had eased the strain of domestic work.She could now sell her vegetables at a business centre 15 km away for more money than she would get locally.“We used to carry firewood on our heads for very long distances ... but now it’s much easier as this motorcycle has taken away that burden,” she told Reuters after a trip to the community water borehole.Fadzai Mavhuna, the Hamba pilot coordinator since February 2019, said women paid an equivalent of $15 a month as a group to lease the Hamba, which has a maximum range of 100 km.It costs between $0.50 and $1 to change the motorcycle batteries, which are charged at a solar-powered station.Mobility for Africa is now in the second phase of the pilot project before it can go commercial. The Hamba is assembled in Harare with kits made in China and will be sold for $1,500.“Some of the women have increased their income because they have embarked on ... projects like baking, tailoring and horticulture,” said Mavhuna.Pamhidzai Mutunya, a farm health worker, said before the arrival of Hamba, many women gave birth at home while others had to walk 12 km to the nearest clinic because there was no transport.“We now have fewer cases of pregnant women giving birth at home,” the 35-year-old mother-of-three said.She ferries an average of four people to the clinic a day and also collects medicines for patients.

Germany

Zimbabwe

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Mobility for Africa

<p>Berlin-based electric battery recycling company, called betteries, is collaborating with Mobility for Africa to help with making transportation products more accessible and more sustainable for the people in Zimbabwe. Electronic car companies get rid of batteries once they are not perfectly performing, but that also means large amounts of batteries that can still perform at lower rates are ending up as waste. That is why betteries has developed a second life usage for these used batteries and with Mobility of Africa, they created an electric transport solution for the people in Africa. -Mobility for Africa’s pay-as-you-go solution especially helps women to be able to transport their goods to markets in an affordable way, building impactful social value and increasing their income and opportunities. To ensure full circularity betteries uses a batteries-as-a-service model, therefore, once the second-life batteries get depleted, they are brought back to Europe by betteries, who will dispose of them responsibly.</p>

Giving a Second Life to Electronic Batteries to Create Sustainable Transport in Zimbabwe  

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This collection is part of Footprints Africa's work to build a comprehensive database of circular economy initiatives in Africa. 

This is a result of the collaboration with the <a href="https://www.acen.africa" target="_blank">African Circular Economy Network (ACEN)</a>, as part of the programme to support the circular economy transition in Africa. Footprints Africa's vision is that businesses can be a force for good at scale. Their mission is to advance sustainable, scalable and inclusive approaches to development of local African economies. Footprints Africa supports SMEs to adopt future-friendly practices, such as those inspired by the circular economy, to address the challenges of growth and create jobs. 

This open-source dataset features well over 500 cases and 200 examples of policies and laws and intent to collect inspiring examples of initiatives from across Africa, in order to inform the global dialogue, which is largely focused on the European and American context. 

To learn more about Africa's initiatives and content to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, visit https://www.footprintsafrica.co/



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Footprints Africa

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Producing transporation equipment and providing services for thetransportation of goods and people

Transportation and Logistics

Ensure renewable, reusable, non-toxic resources are utilised as materials and energy in an efficient way

Prioritise regenerative resources

Regenerate strategies phase out hazardous or toxic materials and processes and substitute them with regenerative biomass resources. A circular economy aims to mimic natural cycles—by shifting to more regenerative farming practices, for example—while also maximising the share of circular biomass that enters the economy. Regeneration can happen both at the systems level (by designing regenerative processes) as well as at the product level (by switching synthetic to organic fertilisers, for example).

Regenerate

Archetypes

CE Materials

Materials

Nace Sectors

Topics

Urban Opportunities

Whilst no two countries are the same, there are still obvious similarities between some of them, with discernible development patterns and parallels in evidence. Common problems and shared solutions help place unique country identities and individual issues in context.

Whilst this classification is far from clear-cut and exhibits some overlap, it does underline how the discourse on transitioning to a circular economy needs to account for both differences and commonalities, if we are to arrive at a more strategic and instructive analysis. It also allows to highlight a set of key themes that are likely to be central to the countries that fall under the respective profiles. 

Country profiles (Build, Grow, Shift)

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A framework to distinguish between different country profiles and their circular transition needs.

Browse case studies by type of implementing stakeholder.

Implementing stakeholders

It is 2050.  Full systems change has taken place. This wouldn’t have been possible without the immediate action and radical steps taken from 2020 onwards. Many targets had to be identified in the early 2020s and achieved by 2030 to ensure that the 2050 goal happened in full. A sense of urgency, turbo stakeholder collaboration, supportive government regulation and clear, data driven targets enabled the mindsets and systems change needed to transform to a fully circular textiles ecosystem.

A circular economics model underpins what we have created. It reflects and supports a living organism made up of makers, users and restorers, interacting across vibrant and interconnected networks. Checks and balances, alongside transparency and accountability, ensure a healthy system. Financial, environmental, and social metrics have the purpose of serving communities and the planet. There is shared ownership of profit and loss – across all three metrics – throughout the value chain.

This is what we’ve achieved over the last 30 years:

WCTD Themes

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The Circular City Actions Framework provides urban changemakers with five complementary strategies they can use to start working towards a more circular system. 

The framework is action-based to provide users with concrete strategic directions and showcase the desired outcomes of each strategy. 
The framework consists of five complementary **strategies**, under which **sub-strategies** provide further detail. Finally, each sub-strategy consists of a diversity of tangible **solutions** which are framed in relation to key thematic areas. 

Note: solutions are currently focused on:
- 🍏 **Food systems**
- 🏢  **Built environment**
- 👕📱  **Consumer goods**
- ⚡ **Energy Systems**
- 🚌 **Mobility Systems**
- 💧 **Water Systems**

More thematic areas are coming soon...

'Click through each of the five strategy cards below to explore the framework and circular economy case studies in more depth!'



This framework was developed in collaboration with ICLEI, Metabolic and Ellen MacArthur Foundation with support from the MAVA Foundation. Read more about it [here]( https://circulars.iclei.org/action-framework/). 



Circular City Actions Framework

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An action-based framework for local governments working towards circular cities

Thematic Areas

City Stakeholders

Test Framework

Challenges

Based on the ongoing ISO standardisation process, a taxonomy has been defined under which to cluster indicators to measure circularity. 

ISO Taxonomy

If managed well, the transition to the circular economy will have multiple benefits for the labour market, including the opening up of job opportunities, raising job standards and reducing inequalities through a global redistribution of value. But a positive transition to circularity for work and workers must be underpinned by three pillars: upskilling the workforce, quality of work and inclusive job opportunities. Find out more and explore cases that illustrate these pillars below.

Circular Jobs Initiative Pillars

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A positive transition to circularity for work and workers must be underpinned by three core pillars.

This is a survey that dives into understanding the policy environment around specific circular solutions. 

The survey is divided into five sections, based on the five key elements of the Circular Cities Action Framework. 
Each section asks 2-3 questions to explore which policies may or may not be present within your city to support a transition towards a circular economy. 

You are not alone! Each question provides some practical examples from cities around the world that have adopted a certain policy to support their transition. This can help to compare with your city - is your city doing something similar?

The survey answers should be based on your current knowledge, and not illicit additional research - ! Please make use of the Not sure option as appropriate.


Ganbatte Cities Policy Tracker [Food]

Ganbatte Cities - Policy tracker policy instruments

Policy Tracker - TEST

By leveraging technological know-how and manufacturing skills from the revolution taking place in electric transport, Mobility for Africa will produce low-cost quality renewable electric tricycles, bicycles and small scale vehicles built for a rural off road environment.  Branded under “Mobility for Africa", the transport will be designed to cater to the user’s need for local mobility, provide long term and low interest financing to make them accessible and invest in the longer term off grid community based renewable power solutions. 

Africa

Footprints Africa supports SMEs to adopt future-friendly practices, address the challenges of growth and create jobs, using supply chains as a tool for development. 

<p>Mobility for Africa intends to produce low-cost quality renewable electric tricycles, bicycles and small scale vehicles built for a rural off road environment. Branded under �Mobility for Africa", the transport will be designed to cater to the user�s need for local mobility, provide long term and low interest financing to make them accessible and invest in the longer term off grid community based renewable power solutions. Currently, a pilot targeting small scale farmers is building the evidence to usage, financial sustainability, technology, including renewable and GPS, and the social and economic impact on households</p>