Kolektivo is proud to announce that Kolektivo Network, in collaboration with Zed Labs, has been selected as one of the eight teams out of 400 start-ups globally, to join the Unicef Venture Fund’s first Climate Tech Cohort to build open-source technology for climate action.

The Climate Tech Cohort includes funding and technical assistance for building upon the Kolektivo prototype. The Kolektivo team has set out a one-year work plan in collaboration with UNICEF’s Venture Fund mentor to realize our milestones and create a solution that will profoundly impact the youth’s ability and willingness to participate in climate action.  

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Successful cohort kick-off in Stockholm
Last month, Mark Pereira, Founder of Zed Labs and lead of Kolektivo Trinidad, and Luuk Weber, Founder of Kolektivo Labs, joined the cohort kick-off at the UNICEF Office of Innovation headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. They spent four days engaging in mentorship sessions and workshops and connecting with fellow cohort members. The kick-off created a strong foundation for the next 12 months. The Kolektivo team was excited to experience how committed and engaged the UNICEF Venture Fund is in building digital public goods and leveraging frontier technologies. 

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Rewarding climate action and enhancing capacity

In the coming year, we’ll build the Kolektivo prototype developed in the past years to add new functionality and improve the overall product to accelerate community capacity building and impact coordination. The platform will allow citizens to earn badges for completing learning tracks and participating in meaningful community action. In addition to the badges, citizens can earn community currencies, which can be spent at various local vendors. We hope to accelerate local development and trade through the platform, allowing communities to become more self-sufficient and sovereign. Kolektivo benefits from the global, carbon-negative infrastructure and tooling by building an open-source platform on the Celo blockchain.

Pilot programs in Trinidad and Curaçao

The initial pilots will take place in Trinidad and Tobago, where dozens of high-school teens will receive syntropic agriculture training and contribute to local regenerative food production while earning badges and community currencies they can spend at vendors around their schools. This initial program sets the foundation for more significant initiatives by Kolektivo Trinidad.

In parallel, Kolektivo Curaçao will continue to build on the four years of local pilots and community building by organizing three impact tracks coordinated through the Kolektivo platform.

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The Future of Kolektivo Network

In 2024, Kolektivo aims to release the first version of its local-impact economy platform based on the developments and learnings from the Unicef Venture Fund mentorship and pilots. Following the successful release, we would open up for ecosystem builders in other regions, focusing on the Latin American and Caribbean regions. Having already established content with teams in Colombia, Suriname, and Barbados, we see a lot of potential for regional expansion.

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