Today’s episode is with Majd Mashharawi, a resident of war-torn Gaza, who observed the acute need for access to construction material in order to rebuild damaged buildings and infrastructure.

She strove to meet this need by founding GreenCake in 2015, a company that creates environmentally friendly bricks from ash and rubble. GreenCake was a runner-up in the annual MIT Pan Arab competition.

In the summer of 2017 she developed SunBox, an affordable solar system that produces energy to alleviate the effects of the energy crisis in Gaza, where access to electricity has been severely restricted, sometimes to less than three hours a day. With SunBox, she has been able to provide electricity to hundreds of people.

In 2018 she was selected as one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company and SunBox won the MIT Pan Arab competition, competing against 6000 entries. Her TED Talk, How I’m making bricks out of ashes and rubble in Gaza, has received nearly 1.3 Million views so far. Last September Ms. Mashharawi and Sunbox company was awarded the Muhammed Ali Humanitarian Award in Louisville Kentucky by the Muhammad Ali Center.

You can find her on FB, Instagram, Linkedin.

We talk about the following and so much more:

✅ Why she decided to focus on electricity in Gaza as an industry

✅ Why and how she created Sunbox

✅ Some of the challenges she faced in building the product and the company

✅ How being a new mom has transformed the way she sees the world

Stay tuned for upcoming episodes with startup founders in the Middle East and North Africa!

Please tag us and tell us what you learned. We’d greatly appreciate a review if you are enjoying these conversations.

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