Bananas and oranges: Green skills without borders

The Green Skills Award (GSA), organised by the European Training Foundation (ETF), is a recognition platform that offers a revealing lens on how green entrepreneurship is sprouting beyond the EU’s borders. This year’s edition surfaced projects that resonate deeply with the challenges highlighted in the Draghi report on EU competitiveness, which calls for urgent investment in green and digital skills, stronger vocational training systems, and enhanced lifelong learning to boost innovation and economic resilience. 

Out of the many inspiring stories, two in particular emerged because of their capacity to combine job creation in a sustainable sector with a strong impact on women’s opportunities. 

Egypt’s Right to Life Project, implemented by the Badr Association, turns discarded banana trees into sustainable materials while creating jobs for rural women. O-Krug from North Macedonia upcycles orange peel waste into eco-friendly products, training marginalised youth in the circular economy. These projects demonstrate scalable, practical solutions that the EU can learn from and integrate, revealing that building Europe’s future competitiveness is not just about internal reforms. It requires embracing partnerships with neighbouring countries with mutually beneficial goals that aim to make the whole region more prosperous. 

Training as Resilience 

The Green Skills Award is a platform where under-represented voices bring forward tangible and scalable solutions to the intertwined challenges of climate change, employment, and skills development. 

“Many youngsters in my country discovered details of my project that they didn’t know, and got to know other sustainable enterprises around the world,” said Marija Burgevia, CEO of O-Krug, one of this year’s finalists. 

Each year the GSA highlights projects that show the relevance of education and training in people’s lives. In 2021, for example, Ghada Zaki Krayem from Gaza won with her solar technician training initiative, which empowered vulnerable youth – many of whom are refugees – to build skills in an area torn apart by conflict, poverty, and unemployment. “I needed an in-demand specialty to stave off unemployment,” Ghada explained, emphasising how skills serve not only as economic tools but also as sources of resilience and dignity. 

On the one hand, these initiatives provide policymakers with clear evidence of the importance of supporting education and skills development beyond EU borders. On the other, they offer the youth of EU neighbouring countries a platform to consider Europe as their fundamental partner. This is particularly important given shared issues such as migration pressures, youth unemployment, and the urgent green transition. 

Local Waste, Global Impact 

In Egypt, Mahmoud Zeda is tackling a persistent agricultural challenge: the disposal of banana tree waste. Once burned or left to rot – contributing to pollution and lost economic potential – these fibres are now transformed into mats, carpets, and handbags through a simple, cost-effective process. This approach not only generates sustainable income for rural women and youth but also embodies a larger vision. 

“Our work isn’t just about sustainability; it’s about dignity and opportunity. These fibres carry stories of survival and self-reliance. The EU can gain valuable insights by learning how low-resource communities tackle complex challenges with creativity: these lessons can help shape inclusive, effective green transition policies,” said Zeda. 

Meanwhile, in Skopje, North Macedonia, Marija Burgevia leads O-Krug, a women-led enterprise that turns orange peels from local cafés into essential oils, natural air fresheners, and compost. Their circular economy model is low-tech but high impact. Distribution is done by bicycle, and packaging is plastic-free. 

“We’re not just solving a waste problem,” Marija reflects. “We’re opening futures to young people like me. I am a woman from the Western Balkans raised by a single mother, and yet I was able to build up this company alongside my colleagues. Our project can be replicated elsewhere – biowaste is everywhere, the third source of pollution in the world. Our innovative solution is not restrained to Skopje.” 

Competitiveness and Cooperation 

With demographic decline accelerating, labour shortages, and the need for new expertise, the EU must look more towards its neighbours. From rural Egypt to urban North Macedonia, stories like those of Mahmoud Zeda and Marija Burgevia show that solutions to regional problems often lie just beyond the EU’s borders. 

Institutions that help identify and cultivate such stories, facilitate mutual recognition of skills, and build joint training ecosystems across borders should be at the core of Europe’s resilience strategy. 

The Draghi report set out a roadmap for Europe’s competitiveness in the coming decades. But what it largely leaves unspoken is where and how that roadmap will intersect with stories and innovations taking root outside the EU. Institutions like the ETF have long worked in the background to support such developments – not by imposing models, but by listening to what is already working on the ground and helping it scale up. From developing green skills frameworks in Georgia to aligning technical training with EU standards in Morocco or Moldova, this kind of transnational collaboration is often invisible, but essential. 

The green transition will not happen within the EU alone.

 “Climate change does not observe borders, it does not stop at the entrance of the EU,” as Burgevia stresses. 

Our institutions need to speak of cooperative education systems, interconnected training infrastructures, and green and digital jobs that flow across the Mediterranean and the Balkans – not through brain drain, but through structured, mutually beneficial investment. 

The stories of Mahmoud and Marija show us that innovative solutions are abundant at Europe’s doorstep. What is missing is the mechanism to amplify them.