Rebecca Hope
Winner of Amsterdam Startup Launch 2023 South African founder Rebecca Hope has been leading innovation in the global EdTech space to provide organisations with a scalable method of accelerating growth through better speech. Rebecca's startup The English Square uses an innovative learning model to help organisations solve communication problems, maximise opportunities and increase momentum.
Using her voice as an African entrepreneur with an international track record, Rebecca speaks on topics relating to creativity for innovation and growth, cross-cultural communication to maximise opportunities, storytelling in any context, and the role of EdTech in accelerating growth.
Birthed out of solving a socioeconomic problem in 2019, musical artist, linguist and speaking coach Rebecca Hope started training prospective and practicing South African English teachers to teach English online with the goal of providing a promising alternative work option in a context where unemployment is a pressing societal issue with over 50% of the country's youth unemployed. This came after Rebecca herself had been an online teacher on the Edtech platform Verbling since 2016. Her online teaching lifestyle had enabled her to pursue a passion in music, traveling internationally to write, record and perform original music as a singer and violinist. Using her story to empower other South Africans, hundreds of teachers were trained nationwide to teach conversational English lessons online, building a sustainable online teaching practice.
As a Nelson Mandela University graduate in Applied Language Studies, Rebecca continued her research in addressing communication needs beyond language. After months of research and development with various groups in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands in 2022 and 2023, it became clear that the existing solutions for organisations tackling speech problems lacked in many areas of quality, efficiency and scalability.
Employees and executives of Fortune 500 companies and TED talkers have experienced personal and professional transformation essential for growth through The English Square's multidisciplinary method of speech development. Recently, Estée Lauder Companies' executive tech team took part in a 3-day live training at their Global Technology Center in Bucharest, Romania, expressing that "It was the best training ever - how speech can improve an organisation's performance" (Okem Molokwu, Director Business Analysis).
