Description:
GreenTech Rangers (www.greentechrangers.com) is an innovative startup pre-acceleration programme designed to improve environmental and social entrepreneurial ecosystem in Moldova with the potential to go beyond. The programme integrates various social startup initiatives to create a valuable learning and development journey for young talents and prospective entrepreneurs in Moldova with the scope to improve the natural environment in the country. The initiatives within the programme include inspirational meetups called Green Drinks (www.facebook.com/chisinaugreendrinks), preparation workshops, Eco-hackathons and Climathons (www.climathon.climate-kic.org/europe/moldova/chisinau), bootcamps, coaching and mentoring meetings, study visits, and ClimateLaunchpad Moldova (www.climatelaunchpad.org/countries/moldova), which is part of the world?s largest competition of green business ideas. In addition, the programme offers its participants and partners the unique online platform for continuous learning about environmental and social entrepreneurship and for building startups remotely.

Organisers:
The GreenTech Rangers programme is organised and led by a social entrepreneurial organisation MEGA (www.megageneration.com). Since 2020, MEGA is also serving as a hosting organisation for the ClimateLaunchpad Moldova competition. In both GreenTech Rangers and ClimateLaunchpad Moldova, MEGA works closely with a local co-working space Generator Hub (www.hub.md). In this consortium, Generator Hub assists with the organisation and management of events. Particularly it hosts Green Drinks meetups and implements local hackathon called Climathon Chisinau, which is part of the global network of Climathons.

Issues and Themes:
GreenTech Rangers addresses the issues of underdeveloped environmental and social entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Republic of Moldova and consequently very limited potential for innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to the omnipresent challenges of environmental pollution, degradation of natural habitats, and climate change. As a way to deal with the issues, the GreenTech Rangers programme is focused on nurturing and supporting intra- and entrepreneurial startups specifically in the GreenTech / CleanTech / EcoTech industry. Through its startup development and support process, the programme contributes to achievement of a number of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The specific Goals chosen for the 2020 ? 2021 editions of the programme are: SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, and SDG 13: Climate Change.

Innovation:
The main innovation of the GreenTech Rangers programme, which is also its core instrument and product, is the GreenTech Rangers online platform (www.greentechrangers.online). It is a digital learning-and-startup-building tool created for prospective environmental or social entrepreneurs, who are focused on financially sustainable solutions to environmental or social issues.
The purpose of the platform is to assist young people in overcoming the most common challenges and obstacles in environmental or social business development and in evolving their ideas to financially sustainable startups with stable sources of revenue and contribution to the improvement of climate and the natural environment. The platform's interactive and intuitive progression process enhanced with e-learning and gamification allows users to grow their ventures with environmental or social value from raw and untested ideas to fully-fledged, financially sustainable, and profitable startups.
The most important and prominent components and features of the GreenTech Rangers platform, which had been fully implemented during the timeline of the project, are the Startup Constructor and the Administration dashboard. Startup Constructor allows users to develop their environmental or social startups block by block, like a LEGO constructor, by combining different elements together and seeing the startup building up. Information for the startup development process comes from users? activities on other components of the platform. Furthermore, users can create and manage more than one startup at a time, thus experimenting with several entrepreneurial ideas at once and deciding which one is truly worth pursuing further. For organizers of startup accelerators, competitions, and educational activities focused on social or environmental entrepreneurship the platform offers comprehensive Administration dashboard. There organizers can manage their startup-focused events, connect with participants, assess progress of startups created within those events, and support the startup teams with training, mentoring, and consultancy.

Activities:
During the project implementation period of 2019 ? 2021, we had managed to organize two complete editions of the GreenTech Rangers programme and the ClimateLaunchpad Moldova competition with the third edition being underway. As part of these editions, we hosted six inspirational seminars and Green Drinks meetups, organized over ten educational and preparation workshops on different aspects of environmental and social entrepreneurship, offered individual coaching and mentoring support to our participating startup teams, took the teams on several inspiring study visits, ran a summer camp on startup building, held local and regional startup pitching competitions, and concluded the project with one Ecohackathon-Climathon. To run all these events and to offer inspirational and educational value to their participants, we involved more than thirty local and international speakers, trainers, coaches, and mentors with knowledge and experience in ideation, innovation, fundraising, startup development, startup pitching, nature conservation, climate change mitigation, renewable energy, sustainable development, and other relevant topics. Certainly, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and all the restrictions associated with it, practically all activities and events of GreenTech Rangers in 2020 and 2021 happened online via Zoom, StreamYard, Discord, and the newly created GreenTech Rangers platform. It is actually due to the challenge of ?going online and remote? that we intensified our efforts in conceptualizing, designing, developing, and testing our online platform, as well as ultimately implementing it within the first edition of Ecohackathon-Climathon.

Results:
Because of the above-mentioned activities and events, we succeeded in educating over 100 young people in Moldova on different aspects of environmental and social entrepreneurship, eco-innovation, nature conservation, sustainable development, and climate change. About 20 of our participants formed 12 startup teams and developed their entrepreneurial ideas into concrete concepts and business models of environmental and social ventures.
The ventures that emerged from the GreenTech Rangers programme and the ClimateLaunchpad Moldova competition in 2019 ? 2021 were: Acacia Land providing service of recycling woody and organic biomass into energy for households, Saver Consumer creating an online information portal with a shop for guiding consumers into making more environmentally conscious purchases while shopping, Globeco Energy producing cost-efficient, accessible, and low-power wind turbines and providing associated service of designing and constructing power supply systems with the wind turbines integrated into it, Vego-Mix creating outside-the-balcony garden that brings food products and provides small urban habitat for local fauna, H2Only offering a mobile device for purifying water in large quantities, Nida offering biodegradable tableware made from waste of the wine industry, Arboretum providing service of corporate forest plantations, Home Grown creating customizable kits for indoor gardening, Compost Energy / Marinoff Cardaslar providing service of efficient recycling of animal manure and production of organic fertilizer and energy, Ecotreatment solving the issue of pollution of water bodies with plants and ecosystem services, Cosul Bun setting up the service of collecting textile waste and recycling it into handmade products, CaStic solving the issue of plastic pollution by employing ecosystem services in the form of plastic-eating moth caterpillars. Some of these startups are already growing further and gaining some traction, while others are still in the early development process. Therefore, it is too early to evaluate their results, positive impact, and success at this stage, especially for the ideas that were born and developed at Ecohackathon-Climathon in 2021.
Besides educating Moldovan youth about environmental and social entrepreneurship and nurturing startups, another important achievement of the project was the creation and release of the functional Beta version of the GreenTech Rangers online platform. This version is now available at www.greentechrangers.online and contains the most important sections, namely User Profile, Startup Constructor, Learn and Build, and Administration. With these sections ready, the GreenTech Rangers platform allows its users to create their personal profiles and profiles of different startups, develop those startups through a series of levels, and participate with the startup profiles at various competitions and challenges. Teams of two of the above-mentioned startups, Cosul Bun and CaStic, are now using the platform to develop their entrepreneurial ideas and social business models further.

Lessons learnt:
What we have learnt from implementing the GreenTech Rangers project is that, first of all, our project alone does not solve the entire problem of lack of education and preparation on environmental and social innovation and entrepreneurship in Moldova. There should be more involvement of different actors, both private and state, on the ?scene? and collaborations among these actors for the real important changes to begin happening.
Another insightful lesson for us was that people do not appreciate things and do not value benefits they gain when those things and benefits come for free. People to start valuing things and opportunities, when those people need to pay for them in money, time, or efforts. Therefore, in offering the GreenTech Rangers platform to other startup-supporting organisations and programmes, we will experiment with a social business model and particularly with changing fee for subscription and additional services.
One more lesson to note here is that design and development of such a complex digital product as the GreenTech Rangers platform requires significant amount of efforts and time. Instead of being mixed with activities of the programme and the ClimateLaunchpad Moldova competition, work on the platform should have been a project apart or at least run by a separate team. In further development and maintenance of the platform, we will try to follow the lesson and have a dedicated team working only on this product of ours.
Finally, we have learnt that we need to start thinking about legacy for GreenTech Rangers and ClimateLaunchpad Moldova. We have ?inherited? the latter from another organisation EcoVisio that had been hosting the competition before us. Eventually, we will need to do the same, especially if we want to focus fully on the GreenTech Rangers platform. Hence, we will need to start searching for and involving an organisation / team to pass on the legacy for the GreenTech Rangers programme and the ClimateLaunchpad Moldova competition in the near future.