Melissa was born and raised in Pretoria, South Africa. After obtaining her legal degree at the University of Pretoria, she spent three years in private legal practice, whereafter she joined the corporate world as an in-house legal advisor. For most of her career, she's been active in the renewable energy space. She has two amazing kids and dogs, and a bucket list item for her would be to see the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant in Iceland. Her favorite travel destinations are the Kruger National Park and the Western Cape.
Today’s “Five Minutes With” interview features Adriaan, who gave up the sunny grounds and dark basements studying experimental physics at the California Institute of Technology to join Lendahand in the middle of the pandemic. Apart from working on data, technology, and investments at Lendahand, he enjoys rock climbing.
One year ago we moved to our office on Eendrachtsplein in Rotterdam. Lendahanders love their office. On our blog, we tell you all about what makes it so unique.
Today we introduce you to Vini in our second interview of our “Five Minutes With” series. Vini is Brazilian, and among other interesting facts, he learned to program when he was only 11 years old and initially studied game development.
Lendahand has almost doubled in size in the last 1,5 years. Time for a re-introduction of our team! Starting in this series is our newly appointed CFO: Daniel van Maanen. Daniel joined our company this January (how much the times have changed since then..), has a background in investments and was the CFO at his previous company Aircrete.
Last month I wrote about my visit to our solar partner upOwa in Cameroon. Their solar home systems literally empower people. Even people in remote places get access to clean energy. Today I’ll take you to one of these places. Travel along to Sa’a and get to know the Bobofils family.
The following story is written by Ella van Kranenburg: As one of the supervisory board members of Lendahand, I wanted to witness where crowd invested money ends up. That’s why I joined Lendahand’s Peter Heijen and Thomas Plaatsman together with a few investors on a short, intense and educational field trip to Zambia. Rest assured, both the investors and I bought our own tickets.
Enjoying a cold beer, relaxing with Netflix or simply turning on a lamp. What is normal to us, is a dream to many folks. More than a billion people across the world don’t have reliable access to energy. And of those 600 million people live in Africa. upOwa, partner of Lendahand, makes a big difference in Cameroon with their solar home systems. I visited upOwa and found out the impact of your investment.
Recently, a group of our investors paid their own way to travel to Zambia and visit a few of our projects, guided by Lendahand Founder Peter Heijen and Investment Manager Thomas Plaatsman. We wanted to bring you a few of their stories so you can share in their experience. The following is a guest post written by Heini Withagen.
Discover the stories of Grace and Rachel and their families
In Kenya, unhealthy air is the no.1 cause of death. What can you do about it?
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