Around the World with CE: Footprints Africa’s Interactive Journey

Footprints Africa is a registered UK charity that supports African SMEs in adopting future-friendly practices, addressing the challenges of growth and creating jobs, and using supply chains as a tool for development. The CE-hub has been engaged with Footprints over the past 2 years and are keen to promote their work to a wider audience. One of the charity’s projects is the building of a bank of 500 case studies that showcase inspiring examples of Circular Economy initiatives across Africa. To accompany their database of case studies, housed in their Knowledge Hub, Footprints Africa have recently launched a new website – ‘The Circular Opportunity – African Stories’. The website is a self-described ‘Virtual Journey’ through African CE initiatives, featuring a selection of case studies that have been adapted into interactive stories. Site users are able to undertake either ‘curated journeys’ that showcase stories grouped by themes such as fashion, regenerative agriculture, and e-waste, or to search for stories by name, category or location.

With support from The African Circular Economy Network, this new site was built in partnership with Happyporch, a strategy, technology and web development B Corp that works largely with organisations undertaking Circular Economy action. Following the launch of ‘The Circular Opportunity: African Stories’ site, Footprints Africa and Happyporch hosted an event on 20^th January 2022, inviting feedback on the website and its elements. The event included a walkthrough of the website, and a discussion of the project’s objectives, which included the goal of informing and inspiring CE action across different cultures and geographies by using African CE business model approaches as an inspiration. The event also gave an insight into the development process of the website, which you can read more about in this Happyporch article.

Attendees were invited to give feedback on and insights on the website both during the event, and after on a virtual posterboard. In her article detailing the site development process., Happyporch developer Grace Witter states that this feedback, alongside user data, will be used to further build the site, and help Happyporch and Footprints “decide what we can do to bring the most positive impact to the site and how people use it”.

To explore the inspiring Circular Economy initiatives from across Africa, visit The Circular Opportunity: African Stories website here.