Environment and Climate
The tool she wished she had at the start of her career
Comfort Apeh Francis is building Sustainability Career Pathfinder, a platform for people who want a career in sustainability, on which she says 3,500+ assessments have now been completed across 97 countries.
When Comfort Apeh Francis started her career in the sustainability sector, she says she "was also confused and didn’t know where to start from." Years of navigating her path followed. It was still a challenge. So she decided to create "the tool I wish I had when I started my career in the sustainability sector," she says.
That tool is Sustainability Career Pathfinder, a platform that helps people who are interested in a sustainability career find clarity and get started. As at September 2026 she puts it at "3,500+ completed assessments across 97 countries".
“the future of the green economy depends on the workforce we build today”
Comfort Apeh Francis
The problem it is built against is the one she ran into herself. Many people are interested in sustainability, she says, but struggle to understand the different career pathways open to them, to identify the skills they need, and to know what practical experience would make them competitive. The platform is designed to take people "from career clarity to action": it reads their interests, strengths and goals, suggests pathways, then points them at the skills, learning resources and portfolio projects that would demonstrate what they know.
The next piece is a Portfolio Project Sprint, in development, which would give a small cohort the chance to stop learning and start building real sustainability projects, "to help people turn what they are learning into tangible work they can use to demonstrate their capabilities."
She wants it to grow. Her plan is to make the platform "a robust bank" that defines a person's pathway, then helps them get started on the skills they need to build and the resources they need to build those skills. The wider aim is a career development platform for the sustainability workforce as a whole, she says, and particularly for young people in Africa who want to build careers in the growing green economy. The future of that economy depends not only on policies, technologies and financing, she says, "but also on whether we build a workforce with the skills to drive that transition."