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General Motors grabbed the media spotlight last week with the unveiling of an impressive 100 percent renewable energy plan in support of President Joe Biden’s climate action goals. The company has also allied itself with the president’s efforts to grow new green jobs. However, the path ahead is far from clear. On Sept. 29, GM’s CEO and chairman, Mary Barra, was tapped for a two-year term as chair of the Business Roundtable, a conservative-leaning organization at odds with Biden’s vision of passing transformative progressive legislation during his tenure.

Renewable energy for all: GM leverages buying power to move markets

Long before GM embarked on its 100 percent renewable energy journey, the company became notorious among environmentalist circles for two high-profile marketing choices it made in the late 1990s: the ill-fated EV1 electric car and the gas-guzzling Hummer. More recently, GM faced criticism in 2019 for supporting the Donald Trump administration against California in a legal battle over vehicle emissions.

Nevertheless, the over-arching thread of GM’s 21st-century story is the shift into a more sustainable future for U.S. auto manufacturing.

Despite withering criticism from conservative pundits and their allies, GM returned to the electric vehicle market in 2010 with the launch of the Chevy Volt. GM also marked out leadership territory in the areas of renewable energy acquisition, EV charging, energy efficiency and waste reduction, as well as community engagement.

Mary Barra was named CEO in 2014 and elected chairman of the board in 2016. Since then, GM has ramped up its electric vehicle ambitions in tandem with its renewable energy activities. In particular, GM has leveraged its buying power to help accelerate the shift to clean power across entire energy markets, including those in its global footprint as well as here in the U.S.

Among other recent activities, in 2016 GM joined the global RE100 campaign with a commitment to shift to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2050. In 2018, the company became a founding member of a powerful U.S organization called the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA), and earlier this year it signed on to the global Science-Based Targets initiative.

Industrial renewable energy buyers flex their muscles

The REBA roster now includes more than 200 leading corporate energy buyers in the U.S. Not surprisingly, tech and communications firms like Facebook, Google and AT&T dominated the list of top renewable energy purchasers last year. However, manufacturers like GM are also beginning to add their weight to the energy transition.

“REBA members accounted for 97 percent of the renewable energy deals announced in 2020, and as the strategies used to transact in the energy market have evolved, so too has the profile of a typical large energy buyer,” REBA explained in a 2020 overview of its energy ranking.

“While the information technology (IT) sector continues to represent the highest announced renewable energy procurement by volume, industrials and materials was the top sector for new buyers, which indicates the importance of decarbonization of industrial supply chains to meet zero-carbon goals,” REBA added.

GM has played a leading role in that trend, as demonstrated in 2019 when it became the only automaker to be recognized with a leadership award by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership program.

The energy storage secret weapon

Last year REBA unveiled a proposal that would restructure wholesale energy markets to provide energy consumers with more power over their energy supply. The change would benefit industrial users like GM and companies in their supply chains, among other renewable energy stakeholders.

One key to the proposed restructuring involves enabling corporate entities to generate and store their own renewable energy, and that’s where GM’s ambitious new 100 percent renewable energy announcement comes into play.

Last week's announcement caught the media eye mainly because it set a seemingly impossible target of 100 percent renewable energy for the company’s U.S. operations by 2025. That outstrips GM’s own initial RE100 goal for electricity by a good 25 years, and it also beats the Biden goal of 100 percent clean power for electricity by 10 years.

That is certainly impressive, but the focus on numbers has left the crucial energy storage element in the shadows.

GM’s clean power announcement focuses initial attention on sourcing more renewable energy. However, procurement is just part of its four-point plan. GM also emphasizes ramping up energy efficiency. The other two parts of the plan involve energy storage, one from a technology perspective and the other from a public policy angle.

On the technology side, GM notes that it has joined the new Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program as a founding member. Along with Microsoft and other familiar names in tech, another founder is the top the global steelmaker Arcelor Mittal. By joining the program, GM and Arcelor have signaled a new level of energy collaboration between steelmakers and automakers.

As an initiative of the powerful Breakthrough Energy investor group, Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is all but certain to have a significant impact on GM’s renewable energy goals. That includes energy storage, as reflected in the third element of GM’s 100 percent renewable energy goal, in which the company explains it is “creating technology to store renewable energy over the medium and long term, so its power consumption is not disrupted by external fluctuations.”

Those four little words — “medium and long term” — should pop out to anyone familiar with energy storage for grid use, buildings and industrial facilities.

Today’s generation of lithium-ion batteries can provide electricity for a few hours, and that is sufficient for many circumstances. However, GM and others, including the U.S. Department of Energy, are also working toward a future in which renewable energy can be stored for a bare minimum of at least 10 hours of use, with days, weeks or even months of use as additional goals. That means bringing new technologies to market including flow batteries, gravity-based systems and green hydrogen.

Energy storage, microgrids and the need for transformative policy

The advent of long-duration energy storage opens up new avenues for industrial users like GM to develop microgrids that can power their facilities exclusively on renewable energy without sacrificing reliability.

A close web of existing regulatory obstacles stands in the way of such a plan, along with objections from utility companies and other stakeholders. That explains the fourth part of GM’s plan, in which the company advocates for the overhaul of longstanding regulatory obstacles. That position supports REBA’s proposals for overhauling wholesale electricity markets.

“Policy efforts are essential to expand transmission, create microgrids that help deploy renewable energy, and enable markets to price these solutions to enable a carbon-free resilient power system,” GM explains, adding that it “supports policies that enable a carbon-free, resilient power system.”

Speed bumps on the road to decarbonization

The GM announcement portrays a stepped-up level of activity that reflects the urgency of the climate crisis. That stands in contrast to the position of the Business Roundtable.

For example, last spring the Business Roundtable came out in support of the proposed Energy Infrastructure Act, also known as the bipartisan infrastructure bill or BIF, championed by President Biden. The organization’s support was conditional, though, on emphasizing carbon capture and other fossil-friendly measures in the bill.

In addition, the Business Roundtable has been lobbying furiously against the “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill supported by the president, and the effort appears to be working. Democrats in the Senate could vote Build Back Better into law without having to seek bipartisan support, but that can be done only if the entire Democratic caucus of 50 Senators votes in favor, with the tie-breaking 51st vote cast by Vice President Kamala Harris.

Build Back Better includes climate action policies and social, educational and economic equity provisions that would be funded by a significant restructuring of federal tax policy, with impacts focused on corporations and wealthy individuals. Not surprisingly, that bill is vigorously opposed by the Business Roundtable and a laundry list of other conservative organizations.

Political reporters have begun drawing attention to the influence of the lobbying effort on two Democratic U.S. senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

Last week, the two seemed on the verge of leveraging their votes to de-couple the infrastructure bill from the reconciliation bill. Apparently Manchin, Sinema and their allies were betting that progressive supporters of the Build Back Better bill would make significant concessions to court their votes. The end game would be to allow a vote on the infrastructure bill to move forward alone, while stripping the progressive provisions from the Build Back Better Bill.

However, Bernie Sanders and other high-profile progressive senators are not the only ones supporting Build Back Better as written. Manchin and Sinema are the only two holdouts. The other 48 Democratic senators support the progressive elements in Build Back Better, and so does President Biden himself. In addition, public opinion polls consistently show strong support.

In the latest development, the president has made it clear that he is willing to trim the dollar amount of Build Back Better down without enabling its history-making potential to be washed away in a sea of concessions. As reported by Reuters, Democratic senators met with Biden on Friday and agreed to continuing negotiating over the bill.

"It doesn't matter whether it's in six minutes, six days or in six weeks. We're going to get it done," Biden said.

With the Business Roundtable and others still lobbying furiously against such an outcome, it will be interesting to see when and if Mary Barra takes her next trip to the White House.

After all, if GM really wants president-level support for those policy efforts that enable a “carbon-free resilient power system,” it may have to give something in return.

Images courtesy of GM

Sustainable products are in high demand. More than 75 percent of Americans say purchasing sustainable products is at least somewhat important to them, according to a survey released last month by Adweek and the intelligence company Morning Consult, with attributes like “biodegradable,” "plastic-free" and "ethically sourced" being the most attractive to consumers. Target is among the retailers looking to answer the call by stocking more sustainable products — and its latest effort looks to push underrepresented founders and their solutions forward. 

Announced this week, Target's Building Blocks for Better Products (B3P) program is asking businesses led by women and people of color to "reimagine beauty and personal care products with sustainability in mind," a company representative told TriplePundit in an email. 

The program will support nearly 30 businesses owned or founded by women or people in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) community as they seek to launch new products with sustainability attributes, including adherence to Target's own healthy ingredients label, Target Clean. 

"Our goal is to support Black-owned businesses and reduce the opportunity gap for women and people of color in business, whether that’s brands we already carry or smaller startups that are not yet at Target," the company said in a statement. 

Target looks to develop sustainable products from diverse founders 

Target recently published a Q&A with two founders who went through the B3P program, and their stories demonstrate the influence representation can have — and the great ideas that can come forward when people of all backgrounds have a seat the proverbial table.

"If you were to ask me five years ago if I would ever become an entrepreneur, the answer probably would have been 'no,'” Cora Miller, CEO of Young King Hair Care, told Target. "I was quite comfortable in my profession, climbing the corporate ladder. It wasn’t until I had my son in 2017 that my perspective and aspirations completely changed."

Miller's sone Kade was born with a full head of hair, and as he grew older she struggled to find products to help her style it. "I quickly realized, after doing some research and talking to other boy parents, that we are all in the same position — we couldn’t find tailored hair products for black and brown boys," she said. 

From there, Young King Hair Care was born, and Miller and her husband leveraged their decades of experience in the corporate world to develop a line of hair care products for boys featuring plant-based, sustainable ingredients. The brand is now available at the two largest U.S. retailers, Walmart and Target, and ships internationally via an online shop. 

"We firmly believe that representation is critically important for boys of color," Miller said. "We will continue to play an active role in the industry to ensure black and brown young men are seen and have a 'place' on shelves by creating new product offerings."

The B3P program builds on Target's existing connections with organizations that help major brands develop new ingredients and product formulations that pose less risk to the environment and human health. The chance to work with groups like the product development marketplace Novi Connect and chemical researcher ChemForward means a lot for founders just getting started. 

"The connections to ChemForward and Novi are incredibly valued," said Jamika Martin, CEO of Rosen Skincare, an upstart brand looking to "bring the drugstore acne aisle up to speed" with modern research. "As it stands, [Rosen] is a bootstrapped brand that doesn't have access to many platforms like these, so the connections have opened up a wide array of opportunities from product development, formulation, and data to provide buyers around how our brand can continue to grow."

Commitments from retailers put more diverse brands on shelves 

This program is part of Target's broader push to spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by 2025. The retailer is also backing Group Black, a new accelerator looking to deploy at least $500 million in Black-owned media by the end of 2022, with member companies including Essence and Holler.

A number of other major retailers made similar commitments to spend more with Black-owned businesses and other underrepresented founders following the murder of George Floyd and the worldwide social movement that came with it. Retailers including Walmart, Sephora and Ulta Beauty have all pledged to devote more shelf space to Black-owned brands. 

The infusion of investment could be a lifeline: While people of color — and particularly women of color — have been launching businesses at a record pace for years now, their enterprises tend to have lower revenues. Still, as of this year white men are now the minority of small business owners in the U.S., and this equity push from retailers could help bring more of those upstarts into the mainstream. 

“Every day, I am hearing messages from Black-owned businesses that are scaling into these opportunities,” Aurora James, founder of the luxury apparel brand Brother Vellies, told CNBC. Four days after Floyd’s murder, James founded the 15 Percent Pledge and handed businesses a challenge: "We represent 15 percent of the population and we need to represent 15 percent of your shelf space.”

In the year since, 26 companies — including top retailers like Macy’s and Gap — have signed on and pledged to fill 15 percent of their shelf space with Black-owned brands. “It’s a real game changer," James said of the commitments from retailers. "Ultimately, when we actually empower entrepreneurs, who are in many cases living and working in Black communities, that’s when we’re really going to start to see a big difference across this country.”

Images courtesy of Target

Stories unite us, inspire us and persuade us, and this month one of the biggest modern storytellers is betting on the power of story to move the world to action. Ahead of the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, Netflix released a new curated collection of television shows, documentaries, and movies aimed at instilling an appreciation for nature and galvanizing action to protect it. 

Launched in partnership with COP26 organizers, Netflix's “Together for Our Planet” collection includes 30 titles that help viewers better understand what's happening to the planet. "You don’t have to be a world leader to be part of the solution, which is why the people behind COP26 teamed up with Netflix to create this collection," the company wrote in a press statement. 

The collection includes documentary films depicting the beauty of nature and the severity of climate change, such as the Oscar-winning “My Octopus Teacher," David Attenborough's "Breaking Boundaries" and the Netflix original "Our Planet," along with some others you may not expect. Nature-oriented television series like the cult Norwegian favorite "Ragnarok" and the Colombia-based thriller "Green Frontier" also appear in the collection, alongside the sustainability travelogue series “Down to Earth With Zac Efron” and family favorites like "Penguin Town" and "The Lorax." The streaming service is also making select titles available to non-Netflix members on YouTube.

"I hope this collection of stories on environmental and climate action inspires even more people, and their leaders, to take action as the world gathers together for the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow," Alok Sharma, COP26 president-designate, said of the collection in a statement. 

Raising awareness before pivotal negotiations 

COP26 is set to be the most pivotal U.N. climate negotiations since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. Many experts are calling it our "last, best chance" to tackle the climate crisis. 

But a number of issues threaten to strain the talks — from concerns that vaccine inequity will hinder the participation of vulnerable countries, to fears that its ultimate aim to rally national commitments that will halve global emissions by 2030 won't be realized.

As challenges mount, increasing public awareness of the climate crisis and the need for an equitable response can only be a good thing, and Netflix offers a massive megaphone and a potentially receptive audience. Around 160 million households watched sustainability stories on Netflix last year, according to the company, and viewers seem keen to see more. In a recent Netflix-sponsored research study across 16 countries, three out of five people (62 percent) said they’re "very interested" in watching shows and movies that touch on climate issues. 

Netflix has big climate action plans of its own

Netflix is well on the way to being a climate action leader in its own right. The company is targeting net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the end of next year through its Net Zero + Nature initiative.

Last month as part of a special climate action edition of the 3BL Forum: Brands Taking Stands — LIVE!, we sat down with Netflix's first sustainability officer, Emma Stewart, to learn more about the company's aggressive push toward net zero and how others can follow suit. In case you missed it, you can check it out here. 

Image credits: Mollie Sivaram/Unsplash and Netflix

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people found refuge from being stuck in the house by going to state and national parks. But while the outdoors felt like a safe place for some, others may not have felt as welcome. About 60 percent of the U.S. population is white, but they make up around 90 percent of visitors to U.S. public lands.

REI, one of the country’s oldest outdoor outfitters, hopes its new Cooperative Action Fund will help even those numbers.

The nature gap

In the 2020 Nature Gap report, the Hispanic Access Foundation and the Center for American Progress confirmed that Black and brown Americans are three times more likely to live in “nature deprived” areas, with less or no access to parks, paths and green spaces, than white Americans. Many factors contribute to this, including historic redlining practices — that is, racist mortgage appraisals leading to segregated communities — which has led to many communities of color having elevated levels of toxic air and water. This confluence of factors has only been exacerbated by COVID-19, making residents of these communities more vulnerable to complications from the virus.

Visiting state and national parks can be cost prohibitive with travel and park fees, but the parks were also initially designed to be white. John Muir, one of the founding fathers of the National Park System, disparaged Indigenous Americans and said they “seemed to have no right place in the landscape,” despite having lived on those lands for thousands of years. Further, many state and national parks were designed to give white Americans escape from the urban environment, code for segregation. In fact, many parks explicitly followed the letter of the segregationist laws.

It is no wonder, then, that many Black and brown Americans still feel unwelcome at parks and are concerned with being singled out as “out of place” in the landscape. Among reasons cited for not visiting public parks are affordability, access, historical trauma, fear for personal safety, and discrimination.

Further, studies have shown that time in nature helps lower stress levels, increase attention spans, boost immune systems, and reduce risks of psychiatric disorders — if one can feel safe in the environment. During the pandemic, access to these natural spaces unfortunately continued to remain available to a select few, despite the increased need for everyone to lower their anxiety levels.

New REI investment fund will back nonprofits promoting justice and belonging 

REI initiated its Cooperative Action Network earlier this year as a grassroots advocacy platform to increase participation in supporting policy and legislation affecting the outdoors. The network focuses on three areas: climate action, outdoor equity and outdoor spaces, such as National Forests and neighborhood parks.

Launched today, the REI Cooperative Action Fund aims to focus specifically on enhancing justice, equity and belonging in the outdoors.

REI employees, co-op members and the public can contribute to the investment fund, which will make an initial $1 million investment in 19 nonprofit partners, with plans to expand. Grants will focus on three themes:

• Connecting more people outside, which will give to outdoors organizations run by and serving Black communities, Indigenous peoples, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and women.
• Create more space outside, which will support community-led climate projects that improve air and water quality in marginalized communities.
• Centering health outside, which will fund research into mental, physical and emotional health benefits of time spent outside.

REi initially established a foundation in 1993 that funded projects aligned with its corporate platform, such as climate action and access to the outdoors. The new fund, however, is the first to specifically target programs aimed at improving access to outdoor spaces for people of color and low-income communities.

The company has made its name in recent years for taking action seemingly contradicting its bottom line, such as #OptOutside, the campaign started in 2015 that encouraged people to go outside on Black Friday rather than shop, to the extent that it even closes all its stores the Friday after Thanksgiving. But such efforts ended up having a net positive effect on the company’s image and sales.

The bottom line

Like many other retailers, REI suffered during the pandemic as people stayed home. As people start venturing out again, national parks are being overrun with visitors who are desperate for the outdoors. Taking a look at photos from overcrowded parks, the faces remain predominantly white. As REI recovers from pandemic-related losses, investing in increasing access to and equity in open spaces makes sense from a bottom-line and a values perspective.

Image credit: Scott Goodwill/Unsplash

The 2021-2022 school year is the third affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Teachers, students and families continue to struggle with the fallout from digital inequity, as learners without devices or internet access at home fall increasingly behind on their schoolwork. Fortunately, as the digital divide has widened, so has attention to the issue and with it new solutions to ensure equal opportunity for all students. 

What is the digital divide?

“The digital divide, or the homework gap as it's often called, refers to when students and families don't have access to broadband internet and devices to be able to, in this case, access education and educational opportunities,” said Dr. Mayra Lara, associate director of educator engagement at Education Trust-West, a California educational advocacy group. 

When school went virtual during the pandemic, some kids began to fall behind or further behind. And while many school districts provided some sort of device to students, a device is not worth much if the student doesn’t have equal access to the internet. Students of color and those from low-income families are most likely be in this position: In California, for example, 40 percent of low-income students lack access to wireless internet at home. 

Under normal circumstances, not having a computer or internet access at home makes it more difficult for students to complete their homework assignments properly or do research outside of school. During the pandemic, the gap became even more pronounced, as participating in lessons and connecting with teachers became out of reach for more students. 

From an educator’s standpoint, this issue is not only about the current needs for the classroom, but also what it means for a child’s future. “When folks don't have access to education, then we see that there are decreases in home ownership,” said Lara, a former high-school English teacher. “We see gaps in accumulation of wealth. There aren’t just gaps in learning in the short-term, but there are real financial gaps in the long term. We're not being the nation of equal opportunity that we say we are, and that's really what's at stake here.”

“It’s nearly impossible…” 

In the early months of the pandemic, Sophia Simpson-Verger, a counselor with the Renton School District in Washington, started making home visits to check up on students’ progress. In home after home, she saw students struggling to complete their assignments on a parent’s smartphone or entire families relying on one sluggish hotspot for remote work and school. 

In one April 2020 home visit, “a student's father pulled out his phone to show me what his son was attempting to use during the school day, and it just broke my heart,” she said. “That was the narrative I continued to see as I would show up to people’s homes: kids attempting to use a smartphone to do schoolwork.” 

As students grew increasingly frustrated, Simpson-Verger noticed a significant drop in motivation. The vicious cycle led children to fall further and further behind, even after the district began supplying laptops. “The internet is expensive,” Simpson-Verger said, “and when a lot of families are thinking about the expenses they have each month, they just can't account for the internet.”

Public-private partnerships can help close the digital divide

Many public school systems already have strained resources, but schools with higher proportions of students of color and low-income students fare much worse. According to EdBuild, a school funding research and advocacy group, majority-white schools receive $23 billion more in funding than majority-nonwhite schools, even though the number of students is roughly equivalent. With the glaring inequalities highlighted by the pandemic and home schooling, some companies have increased their investment in ensuring more equitable access.

Initiatives like T-Mobile’s Project 10Million, which is investing $10.7 billion to provide free internet and free mobile hotspots for underserved children in partnership with school districts, can help bridge the gap. "The intent of Project 10Million is to not just chip away at the digital divide that separates those with connectivity from those without. It’s to eliminate it, permanently,” Mike Katz, executive vice president of T-Mobile Business Group, said during an acceptance speech for the Barron’s Celebrates: Educational Inclusion 2021 awards. 

"These connections are transformational,” Katz continued. “They level the playing field for young people in school, and they also make an impact far beyond the classroom. Students and their families can access telehealth and online healthcare resources that were once out of reach. Parents can work remotely or search for jobs. Families can stay in touch with distant relatives.”

All in, T-Mobile has connected over 3 million households since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, including families in Renton, Washington. “Being able to partner with T-Mobile to put hotspots in the hands of families is phenomenal,” said Brynn Wilson, a building technology assistant for the Renton School District. "It was the lift we needed to be able to respond to a need our families had right away.” 

Still, Dr. Lara noted that initiatives like these are just the beginning. "Private-public partnerships are so important and vital because oftentimes school systems don't have the resources to be able to meet the needs of all of their diverse learners,” she said. “In the long term, we as a nation also need to be willing to make the investments in infrastructure to ensure students and families have universal and affordable broadband access.”

Image credit: Adobe Stock via T-Mobile

This article series is sponsored by T-Mobile and produced by the TriplePundit editorial team. 

When Peter Ndiwa was growing up in Kenya, his father, a teacher, brought home a collection of fables written in the Swahili language. “They meant something to me because I could read them in Swahili,” he told TriplePundit. “And because they were stories and not course books, I could relate to them.” They were, as he said, “human tales,” and they inspired him to become a teacher and a writer.

Ndiwa’s latest book, “Go Stella Go!,” tells the story of a girl who wants to become an engineer and explores the changing perceptions of girls and their abilities. Written in Swahili, it’s one of the latest projects from NABU, which publishes books in mother tongue languages on a digital app to make literacy accessible to children everywhere.

NABU aims to boost childhood literacy by publishing books in mother tongue languages

NABU gets its name from the Babylonian deity of wisdom and learning, and the nonprofit aims to bring that reverence for the written word to children by enabling them to read in their mother tongue. 

“We’re inspired to bring every child the essential tools they need to access literacy,” Tanyella Evans, executive director and co-creator of NABU, told TriplePundit. “There are 250 million children who can’t access education, and illiteracy disproportionately affects women and children. Two-thirds of the global illiterate population are women, and that number hasn’t changed in 20 years. Women and girls are disadvantaged economically because they’re not gaining essential literacy skills, and the pandemic has made NABU’s work even more urgent with school closures.”

The three key components of NABU’s model are the publishing of books in mother tongue languages, digital access, and reading engagement with families to support literacy development at home and in school. Before starting NABU, Evans worked as a teacher in Uganda and Haiti, and a commonality she noticed was that everyone had access to a mobile phone, even in the poorest areas. “I could spend my life building schools,” Evans told TriplePundit, “but it’s going to be a drop in the ocean. I wanted to make this a platform, a reading app, to reach families where they already are, on devices they already have.”

The benefits of mother tongue books

Books in mother tongue languages make reading accessible for children. “Telling culturally relevant stories in our mother tongue is a way children can relate to them,” Ndiwa told TripePundit. “In Kenya, English is a second language, so children don’t learn it until middle schooling years. They can read our stories [from NABU] at a very early age.” 

Indeed, having access to books in the mother tongue is one of the most effective interventions for children in early grades, Evans said. “It helps children who don’t speak a dominant language at home bridge into learning the official language of their country,” she told TriplePundit. “In Haiti for example, 95 percent of children speak Haitian Creole, yet the school system is in French. The first day children are in the classroom, they’re expected to learn in French. The result is that some children spend four or more years in school without learning how to read or write.” 

The United Nations notes that mother-tongue education facilitates learning and improves skills in reading, writing and mathematics, and NABU has ambitious goals to address underserved languages around the world. “Our vision is for NABU to be everywhere,” Evans told TriplePundit, “like the deity [we’re named for], to be omnipresent.”

So far, NABU has 2,000 books on its app, and it has published collections of 160 books in three mother tongues: Haitian Creole, Kinyarwanda and Swahili, with content also available in French and English for children to bridge to those languages once they gain the skills. 

Some of these books are developed at NABU’s Authentic Book Creation Lab (ABC Lab) in Kenya, where 40 authors and illustrators work to develop their skills and create books. “Go Stella Go!” is one of the titles developed in the ABC Lab, where the NABU team brought in local artists to shape the story from their own experiences. 

“We’re creating a repository of culturally-relevant stories for generations to come,” Beryl Oywer, program manager for NABU in Kenya, told 3p. “When I was growing up, we would sit in a hut upcountry, and my grandmother would tell us stories. We would have tea and hear her stories. But that’s going away. When we put these stories in a digital format, it ensures that we continue to preserve our culture.”

Representation in literature builds children’s self esteem

Additionally, mother-tongue books can improve a child’s self esteem and sense of self worth. “If these children see themselves reflected in stories, they’re more likely to want to read,” Evans explained. 

NABU’s books are designed to uplift and focus on issues like developing resilience, combating gender discrimination, and empowering girls to educate boys in their communities. The stories have a real impact on children like Belize, a 9-year-old girl Evans met in Rwanda, who walked two hours to the nearest library to read books in Kinyarwanda on the NABU app. Once shy and afraid to speak up, reading helped Belize come into her own. 

“She read a story in Kinyarwanda to a group at the library, a story about a cheeky rabbit,” Evans remembers. “She was confident, standing in front of everyone and reading in her mother tongue. Mothers stood at the edge of the room, and it was remarkable for her to be celebrated in that context. [Our books] are about helping girls share their ideas fearlessly. To see the power of literacy, to build a child’s confidence in their value and worth is what keeps me doing this.”

Empowering girls is also what inspired Ndiwa to create “Go Stella Go!” He noted that in many countries, stereotypes remain strong about careers for girls versus careers for boys, and many people still doubt the abilities of girls, despite proof that girls are succeeding. “This is the narrative we should change,” he said. “[I wanted] to point out that girls can do as well in life and in their capabilities and leadership as boys, and to point out to the boys that they can support the dreams of girls, rather than seeing them as competitors.”

Ndiwa already has plans in the works for future books, with a focus on stories that preserve children’s connection to their culture. “There are a lot of stories to write and pass on to the next generation,” he said. 

Bringing partners together to empower girls and build literacy 

“Go Stella Go!” will be released on International Day of the Girl (October 11) in partnership with Girl Rising, a nonprofit that looks to build confidence in girls and help whole communities stand up to gender discrimination. The two partners were brought together by HP, which is supporting both nonprofits as part of its aim to enable digital equity for 150 million people by 2030 through the Partnership and Technology for Humanity (PATH) initiative.

As part of its work with NABU, the technology company will establish the HP Creative Lab at the Kigali Public Library in Rwanda, which will train over 200 African authors and illustrators a year to publish hundreds of books for children in their mother tongue. It will also work with NABU to elevate the voices of marginalized communities in the U.S., beginning with a book about Asian-American discrimination.

The boost from HP will bring NABU closer to its goal to reach one million more readers by the end of 2021 and an additional 200,000 by March 2022. “We started this year with 95,000 readers, and now we have 750,000 readers who read at least 15 minutes a day,” Evans said.

It’s not just for girls

Though the book and partnership will be launched to align with International Day of the Girl, NABU is adamant that boys have a critical part to play in improving girls’ literacy and opportunities. “We always try to align our content in a way that we’re including boys in this conversation,” said Oywer of NABU’s Kenya team. “We want to pass on the message that we can all be champions for equality and equity for girls and women. Through stories like ‘Go Stella Go!,’ we can see how boys can also help girls. All children’s rights are being protected and given an equal platform to rise to their greatest potential.”

For an author like Peter Ndiwa, being given stories that resonated with him in his own mother tongue led to a career teaching boys and girls to lift each other up and telling their stories through his new fables, anchored in his culture. The hope is that through access to mother-tongue books, a child today has that same opportunity.

To learn more about how NABU, Girl Rising and HP are working together to empower girls and build literacy, check out the Girl Rising International Day of the Girl Summit (October 1-3, 2021).

This article series is sponsored by HP and produced by the TriplePundit editorial team.

Images courtesy of NABU

Earlier this month, a partnership to spearhead a transformation in Europe’s seafood industry emerged. On one side of the partnership is Nomad Foods: Europe’s largest frozen food company, owner of brands such as Birds Eye, Findus and Iglo, and maker of tremendously popular fish fingers. One the other, BlueNalu: a fresh player in the sustainable food business from San Diego, California, that aims to be the global leader in cell-cultured seafood technology.

Together, Nomad Foods and BlueNalu will work to identify product opportunities and consumer insights, as well as the regulatory requirements that would come with introducing cell-cultured seafood in Europe. As a result, not too far in the future Europeans may be savoring fish fingers made from cells grown in a lab, not harvested from the oceans.

So, why is this partnership important?

Together with plastic pollution, overfishing is the main reason for the dramatic decline in marine biodiversity that the world has witnessed over the past decades, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) determined in a 2018 report.  Humans have taken almost 6 billion tons of fish and invertebrates from the world’s oceans since 1950. Six billion tons. Can you imagine how many living creatures that is?

Protecting life below water is one of the 17 goals of the United Nations for global sustainable development. All nations and continents need to contribute if we are to achieve this goal, but Europe might need to make an extra effort: Europeans consume more than three times the seafood they produce, making Europe the largest importer of seafood in the world.

Europeans’ appetite for fish remained high even during the COVID-19 crisis. Luckily, Europeans’ preference for fish is joined by an increasing awareness of the environmental and health issues surrounding fish consumption.

From a business perspective, this represents a huge opportunity for Nomad Foods and BlueNalu. However, this partnership could mean much more. We could be witnessing the beginning of a radical transformation in the seafood industry.

The radical potential of cell-cultured seafood

Cell-cultured seafood relies on the extraction of cells from fish, mollusks or crustaceans in order to propagate them in a lab setting. When grown on a proper scaffold, the result is edible seafood with the texture and structure that we know and love from wild-caught fish.

It sounds like science fiction, but this revolutionary technology may be key to repopulating the world’s seas, now decimated by overfishing, illegal fishing and a series of environmental calamities.

Cell-cultured seafood can also turn into a champion of animal welfare, as it could spare billions of living creatures from being fished and farmed in suboptimal conditions. The technology also promises to address consumers’ health concerns, as wild-caught seafood can be the source of mercury, toxins, pathogens and micro-particles of plastic, among other things.

All these benefits make cell-cultured seafood highly attractive, both from a business and environmental perspective, but some challenges lie ahead.

The challenges to overcome

Like all radical technologies, this one will need regulatory approval before it can be applied to mass consumption products in Europe. But the blessing of regulators will not be enough: Consumers will need to accept lab-grown fish, too.

Luckily for Nomad Foods and BlueNalu, Europeans are arguably the most environmentally-aware people in the world and some of the most health conscious. As a result, Europe might be the ideal place to introduce cell-cultured seafood to regulators and consumers.

But then there is the question of costs. We have seen it before: Products made with revolutionary technologies like this one are often very expensive at first. As a result, many will probably think twice before purchasing cell-cultured fish fingers. However, there is reason to be optimistic. Without going too far, prices of lab-grown meat have declined sharply and are expected to achieve parity with regular meat prices soon.

The road ahead

In the words of Stéfan Descheemaeker, chief executive officer of Nomad Foods: “The food industry is at a transformational moment as consumer demand for nutritious, high-quality food is growing, the importance of sustainability has never been more apparent, and the role of technology in delivering these needs is accelerating.”

Nomad Foods is the world’s largest purchaser of sustainable wild-caught fish. Meanwhile, BlueNalu is already focusing its revolutionary technology on fish species that are commonly overfished, difficult to farm-raise and typically imported. Given their track records and orientations, the partnership between the two could kickstart an industry-level transformation built on the pillars of technology, health and sustainability.

If the challenges ahead can be sorted (and there is reason to be optimistic that they will), Nomad Foods' vision of offering “great tasting seafood products that are good for people, good for the planet and accessible to all” could become a reality soon.

Images courtesy of BlueNalu