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In 2024, The Ethical Agency (TEA) partnered with the African Circular Economy Network (ACEN) to design and develop a high-performance, low-carbon digital website that connects circular economy practitioners across the African continent.
In 2024, The Ethical Agency (TEA) partnered with the African Circular Economy Network (ACEN) to design and develop a high-performance, low-carbon digital website that connects circular economy practitioners across the African continent.
Project Overview
The African Circular Economy Network (ACEN) is a pan-African non-profit organisation dedicated to building a restorative and regenerative economy. With chapters in over 30 countries, ACEN required a new website to facilitate cross-border collaboration, host extensive research, and showcase innovation in Africa’s circular sector.
The challenge was to migrate a vast repository of historical data and member information into a modern, intuitive, and highly accessible website. As a sustainability champion, ACEN’s website needed to lead by example – balancing a rich feature set with a low digital carbon footprint.
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The sheer scale of ACEN’s work—spanning multiple languages, regions, and thematic areas—required a rigorous wireframing phase. The Ethical Agency’s UX team focused on a “navigation-first” strategy, ensuring intuitive user journeys, for example, finding country-specific chapters or thematic research papers in three clicks or less. We mapped out custom user journeys for governments, NGOs, entrepreneurs, potential members and researchers to ensure the site effectively served its diverse stakeholder base.
In alignment with ACEN’s circular principles, the website design aesthetic is rooted in best practice “Digital Minimalism.” Using our sustainability-first website design approac,h we limit data-heavy videos and unoptimised images that contribute to greater carbon emissions. Instead, we used:
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ACEN is a professional network focused on accelerating the transition to a circular economy in Africa. It provides a platform for sharing knowledge, policy advice, and business opportunities across more than 30 African countries.
ACEN required a partner that understood both high-level technical development and sustainability principles. The Ethical Agency’s status as a B Corp-certified company and Africa's leading green and sustainable digital agency made it a natural fit for ACEN’s mission.
A sustainable website is designed to use the least possible energy. This involves efficient code, optimised assets to reduce data transfer, and hosting on servers powered by renewable energy.
Yes. The Ethical Agency is the only African organisation verified and listed by The Green Web Foundation for providing 100% renewable energy hosting, helping to limit the carbon emissions of your digital presence.
The site features a custom-built chapter management system. This allows regional representatives to update their local news content and events while remaining under the main ACEN digital umbrella.
We use structured data and semantic tagging. This allows AI bots and search engines to understand the context of the content, ensuring ACEN’s resources are easily found and correctly categorised in AI-generated responses.
Yes, the website features a streamlined Resources section where users can access hundreds of reports, articles, and case studies by country, sector, or date.
Typically, yes. Because sustainable websites are built to be lightweight and efficient, they often load faster, have better SEO rankings, and provide a superior user experience on mobile devices.
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