How systems thinking helps a business become sustainable 

The Sustainable Business Internship is an initiative led by The 50 Percent, Sustainable Kenya and Strathmore University Business School with the aim of bringing together young professionals and small and growing businesses to work on real sustainability challenges. Rooted in the Young person’s guide to systems change, the programme offers training in systems thinking and sustainable business practices, followed by hands-on placements within Kenyan businesses. 

Background 

From skills to opportunity: closing the missing link 

Most youth-focused programmes put a strong emphasis on capacity building and access to skills. But there has always been a missing link: young people have nowhere to apply what they’ve learned and put their new skills to the test. 

There is also a gap within the training itself. Most curricula focus on technical or sector-specific skills but rarely equip young people with systems thinking, the ability to see how different parts of a business or an economy connect and depend on one another. 

There is another piece in this puzzle. The green transition is driving fast-growing demand for green skills, and in Kenya, regulation, compliance and standards are becoming the norm. Businesses are expected to account for their environmental impact and get their sustainability journeys underway. What most lack is not the will, but the dedicated workforce to do the work. 

So there are three problems sitting side by side. Young people with technical training but no grounding in systems thinking. Young people with skills, nowhere to apply them and looking for dignified work. Businesses with the pressure and the workload, and nobody to hand it to. 

This work is about creating a system where young people are not just trained but given a pathway to put those skills into practice and contribute something meaningful and tangible to the green economy. 

Approach 

Turning training into opportunity 

The Sustainable Business Internship programme places interns trained in sustainability and systems thinking into sustainable small and growing businesses and organisations. 

The pilot kicked off in early March 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya, starting with a three-day training programme and followed by a three-month hands-on internship. 

There was clear appetite for the programme, exceeding expectations both from students’ side with fifty-one applications coming in for ten places and the business side with six businesses opening their doors: 

• Grounded – a women-run B Corp making non-toxic home and personal care products 

• Wild Rose – manufacturing sustainable premium shirts and dresses 

• 254 Brewing Company – producing locally crafted beer 

• Nairobi Coffee Exchange – facilitating the marketing, trading,  pricing and sale of coffee 

• Samaki Mtaani – a social enterprise using the fish value chain to empower women in under-resourced areas. 

• Kenyacof – a major coffee trader that sources,  processes, buys and sells green-bean coffee  

The approach was simple: train, find placements and build a long-standing community of young people who keep learning from each other and sharing what they are experiencing. This internship programme goes beyond placing an intern in a job and paying them a monthly stipend. It creates an ecosystem where jobs are created, learning is shared and intergenerational collaboration happens, transforming how education is delivered and harnessing Africa’s demographic dividend, while supporting the businesses and organisations driving the green economy and creating livelihoods for communities. 

Outcomes and impact 

From interns to changemakers: putting skills to work 

Because they were paid and trusted, the interns approached the placement with intent and purpose, not casually. Each of them asked the same question: how can I make a real difference in three months? 

This was not a typical internship: across the six businesses, interns built data pipelines, ran procurement, designed packaging from waste materials, raised funds, wrote training manuals and traced coffee supply chains from farm to export. 

Among the concrete outputs across the cohort were: 

• A CO₂ supplier switch, 36% cheaper than the incumbent. 

• A data pipeline handling roughly 60,000 records. 

• A fundraising and donor database built from scratch. 

• A beehive project taken from idea to implementation. 

• A sustainable packaging concept developed into a practical solution. 

Beyond the informal collaborations that continued after placements ended, the pilot led to two full-time job offers and one intern exploring the entrepreneurial path based on what they learned during the placement.  

During the final presentations, interns spoke about how the programme changed the way they approach problems, not just how they think about sustainability. Not all will end up working in sustainability, but the transferable skills they described will hold up in any industry. Every one of them was glad they had taken the leap. 

Voices from the participants 

Hafsa Abdalla: beyond one role 

Hafsa Abdalla began the programme hoping to specialise in a single area. Instead, she was placed across multiple departments at her host organisation. That approach was “the most valuable part of this internship”, she said. “I got to experience fundraising, finance, marketing, documentation and field operations, which gave me a better understanding of how a business works as a whole”. 

By the end of the internship, Abdalla could see how everything connected: the departments, the field visits, the guest speakers and the shared experiences of her fellow interns. 

“I gained almost everything I was hoping for when I started the internship”, she said. “I got to see how sustainability is actually applied in a business and not just talked about in meetings”. She rated the programme 10 out of 10, explaining, “There is always more to learn, but this experience has genuinely prepared me for what comes next”. 

Alma Sision: seeing the whole system 

For Alma Sision, systems thinking became a practical tool for making sense of the Corporate Social Responsibility projects she was leading. “Systems thinking allowed me to see and make sense of a lot of the initiatives that are being run here, especially with regard to the various projects I was leading. It helped me ask a lot of the right questions. Without a systems thinking lens, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that there is so much more than what meets the eye here”. 

Teddy Gichuhi Mbugua: trust, mentorship and the bigger picture 

Teddy Gichuhi Mbugua, who completed his placement at Wild Rose said, “The internship exceeded my expectations because I was trusted with meaningful responsibilities and mentorship played a significant role”.  

He applied the same systems approach when researching water hyacinth for sustainable packaging.

“Instead of only looking at the technical feasibility, I considered the entire system, including environmental impact, local community livelihoods, supply chains, production processes and market demand. This broader perspective helped me develop recommendations that balanced environmental sustainability with economic and operational feasibility”. 

A two-way exchange: what businesses gained 

Host businesses valued the intergenerational collaboration: having young people learn from what they do and bringing new ideas and perspectives into the room. 

Leigh Ferreira, who was Grounded’s people, systems and growth supervisor at the time, described what the business hoped to achieve through the programme: 

“We joined this programme because we genuinely believe in creating opportunities for young people, not just in theory, but in practice. We wanted the intern to work on something real and meaningful, so we chose a project focused on unlocking the full value of our business systems, eliminating workarounds and embedding better ways of working across the team. We were hoping for the experience to be a win-win: the intern gets hands-on, substantive experience and we get fresh energy and extra capacity on a project we care about”. 

The pattern is clear: when young people are given the right tools and skills, they contribute meaningfully, add value to a business and take on leadership roles beyond what a typical internship expects. 

Looking ahead 

A single pilot, six businesses and ten interns is a strong proof of concept. The ambition is to scale what has been built: more interns, more businesses and more partnerships that strengthen this model while opening the door to new countries and contexts, bridging the gap between academia and industry. 

The next phase looks to bring the same model to other African countries, adapting the training and placement structure to local industries and youth employment landscapes while keeping its core intact.  

Learning and recommendations 

1. Learning should be connected to real work: Training is most effective when it is immediately followed by practical application. Interns who moved from the classroom into live business projects retained and deepened their skills far more than a training programme alone could achieve. 

2. Meaningful responsibility matters as much as technical skills: Being trusted with genuine ownership is what determined whether interns felt able to apply what they had learned. Confidence in systems thinking rose most sharply once interns were given work with tangible consequences for the business. 

3. Peer community strengthens learning and confidence: The relationships built between interns during the training week and throughout the placement created space for encouragement and shared problem-solving, helping them learn beyond the classroom. 

4. Businesses gain as much as interns do: Host organisations benefited from more than an extra pair of hands. Interns brought fresh perspectives, digital fluency and a systems-thinking lens to problems that had often gone unaddressed, while businesses offered mentorship and hands-on context in return. This intergenerational exchange gave businesses access to skilled, motivated talent and gave interns a genuine stake in solving problems that mattered. 

5. Learning and livelihoods should grow together: The strongest outcomes came from pairing training with a concrete economic opportunity. Interns applied and strengthened their skills because the tasks carried real stakes, host organisations saw a direct return on their investment and several placements led to a continued role. 

If you’re curious to learn more about Sustainable Business Internship, you can visit The 50 Percent website.

This story is part of our impact stories feature and was written in collaboration with Samuel Mue, Programme and Partnerships Manager at Sustainable Kenya. Do you have a story of systems change happening on the ground? We want to hear from you!