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Thato Kgatlhanye in the middle of two boys wearing her creations…RedBull

Trash bags transformed into solar-powered school bags

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Thato Kgatlhanye is a South-African native who at the age of 18 along with Rea Ngwane founded Rethaka, a company that uses recycled plastic shopping bags and transforms them into solar-powered school bags that can also be used as a light source at night.  The bags also feature reflective material which enables more visibility in the darkness.

The Rethaka company was founded in 2013 and has “been on a mission to ensure access to education really happens for children who have to thrive even with limited resources at hand, our work demands that we have an ethical imagination: having the ambition to envision a world where everyone has dignity while having the humility to work every day to see make this our reality.”