“When you have women being the most energy-poor across the continent, the fact is that poverty continues to perpetuate itself.”
The above, line spoken by Ifeoma Malo, is not just a statement but an irrefutable truth. When talking about leaders in the African energy industry, her name surely gets a mention!
Recently, I had a great conversation with her where she walked me through the happenings around Africa’s renewable energy sector, her expectations for the sector as well as the relationship between energy and gender.
No doubt you’re curious to find out all the details of our discussion, but before you dive in, let me do a brief introduction.
Ifeoma Malo is one of Africa’s leading voices supporting efforts to achieve universal energy access. Having been fortified with the versatility and broad insights her background in Law afforded her, the Nigerian-born energy advocate has worked in both the public and private sectors for over two decades.
Through her work with the Nigerian Government, she’s held various roles and has been involved in the fiscal, policy, and regulatory management and oversight of the electricity sector. Malo is the Co-founder and CEO of Clean Technology Hub.
As the founder of Clean Tech Hub, tell us how it is empowering startups across Africa?
We’re a hybrid hub that does a lot of things outside of empowering startups. We do research, policy engagements with governments, and help to create an enabling environment. We also do enterprise development and support, which is where our startup and acceleration programs fall into.
We run two programs, one for accelerators and the other is an incubation program. At our incubation program, we get startups ready for late-stage commercial validation, we help them to get some seed funding, which we’re able to give them through All On, our partner.
That’s the whole trajectory; we start off with ideation stage companies, we grow them and get them ready for late-stage commercial validation where they can raise bigger money to run their projects.
Is Clean Energy not just a myth if you consider the everyday realities of developing economies? If not, please elaborate.
It’s interesting because there are about 13 different countries that have run their entire energy systems using renewable energy.
For us at Clean Tech Hub, it’s not an either-or question. We do believe that there is a place for utility-scale power that is sometimes powered by fossils. We’re not saying we should do away completely with oil and gas, we believe that there is space for them.
For developing countries, like Nigeria, there should be a just transition. And what does that mean? It means using renewable energy to get electricity into the hands of the people who don’t have it at all now.
There are communities especially in rural and deep rural communities that are not electrified. Why can’t we get solar power mini-grids or microgrids, and if they are riverine areas, maybe mini-hydros into such communities so that the local people can start small businesses and build industries and no longer have to live in poverty?
And then you leave the large-scale power for the big manufacturing firms who can afford to absorb that power and pay for usage.
This reduces the amount of generator diesel used because those companies will be getting power directly from the grid, reducing carbon emissions.
Getting power into the hands of large-scale manufacturing companies will result in job creation which will drive the economy.
Meanwhile, for the rural and peri-urban communities, you’re also putting power into their hands so that they can start small and medium-sized businesses that can help empower both their families, their communities giving them more opportunities for growth. So that’s where we are when we talk about just transitions.
There are countries that have decided to power their electricity systems using renewable energy. When you talk about countries like Sweden, Finland, the Nordic countries, the U.S, Brazil, India, etc., they are using a lot of renewable energy and selling it back to the grid.
I get that these countries are a lot more developed, but in Africa, we’re saying leave the large power for large-scale manufacturing and renewable energy for homes and small businesses and rural communities.
These sorts of things are important when we talk about development.
How far has Africa gone in its efforts to rely less on fossil fuels and move more to clean energy?
I think it’s important to make the demarcation between off-grid solar projects and on-grid solar projects. There are very large solar projects that have been developed across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Those solar energies are being built to power industrial clusters and we also have the ones that are being built for smaller and mid-sized communities to power communities and help them to develop.
Every country has targets if you look at the INDC. The INDC means Internally Determined Contribution, an initiative under the Paris Agreement in 2015, which talks about how much decarbonization every country is committing to in order to reduce their carbon emissions.
Like I said, every country has set different targets for themselves, including Nigeria.
In Nigeria, we’ve decided to come out with an energy mix, where we’re looking at the different sources of energy that we have in the country, what we can use it for, and what part of the country it is best suited for.
We know there’s a lot of sunlight in the north. That’s why a lot of solar projects are going on in the north and other places that would otherwise not have had electricity due to the topography of the region.
We also use wind energy in places that are on a plateau such as Jos, Mambilla, etc. So depending on the topography, we then decide on the whole range of energy that we’ll be using.
In terms of how Africa is doing, I think we still have some ways to go when it comes to renewable energy usages. This is because we’re still largely underdeveloped and that’s why you’re seeing a lot of the tension and conversations around energy transitions, just transitions, and what they mean for developing countries in Africa and countries like India in Southeast Asia.
Also, how do we make sure that, even as we’re driving the reduction of carbon emissions, those countries don’t get shortchanged in their developmental indices?
These are some of the conflicts or the conversations you hear happening when it comes to the amount of renewable energy the country is using and what they’re using it for.
What are African countries doing now? And what do they need to do?
Let me talk about what they need to do more. The first is that we want them to get to zero taxes and tariffs. When it comes to solar products, there are lots of African countries that still slam heavy charges on solar panels and batteries.
That’s why it’s expensive for the end-users. Think about it, if X is a solar developer whose panels and batteries come from China and India respectively, by the time they get to the Nigerian ports, there is a 15% charge on the batteries and about 5% or 10% charge on the panels.
At the end of the day, X is going to pass them down to the end-users, charging around 8 or 9 million to install a solar panel for a four or five-bedroom house.
Smart countries like Mali and Kenya have decided to put zero tariffs on solar products because they want to get them into the hands of every grandmother and grandfather in their rural communities.
Look at Nigeria and the cost of food. Even, as the cost of food is so high, we still have a lot of people in those farming communities that are not able to sell food, because they don’t have anywhere to keep their farm produce.
For example, farmers get tomatoes, in less than three days they get watered because they couldn’t finish selling them. They’re operating at a loss while the rest of the country is hungry.
But what if they had solar cold rooms to store their tomatoes, peppers, onions, and other perishable goods? They can last for a time frame in which they can finish selling to buyers and then go back to produce more.
Smart countries are using solar to drive productive use, especially agriculture, and using it to feed their country. In effect, they are tying their agricultural policy to electrification which is driven by renewable energy, mainly solar. That’s what countries like Nigeria need to do.
In your opinion, how much funding has gone into clean energy projects?
Even though there’s a lot of funding, the problem in Sub-Saharan Africa is that a lot of that funding is still very grant-based.
Slowly but increasingly, we are seeing a lot of companies move from a grant-based model to a more finance-based model. They are making sure that they’re at a stage where they can actually go and raise sustainable finance and long-term finance.
The other thing we also caution is that clean energy is a long-term investment. It’s not an investment that yields immediate returns in two or three years. You may be looking at five or ten years.
Although a few companies have been able to raise some good money, but they are far between. In Nigeria, I can mention six or seven that have been able to raise money out of the almost 80 companies that I know in this industry; the rest of them are seeking grants.
While African cleantech startups need grants in some respects, they should also be thinking about sustainable finance and how to balance their sources of funding.
Even now, the grants are now far between because a lot of countries, especially western countries are now looking inwards. There’s a rise in ethnic nationalism so, a lot of grants that they would normally give, are refocused on their people, trying to get their own people out of poverty.
What transformation would you like to see in the African energy industry as a whole?
The first is that I want to see more women becoming players in this industry. I think there’s a strong case for women because we’re not just end-users.
In fact, when we’re making policy decisions around electrification, there should be more women on the table, because women are heavy consumers of electricity when it comes into the homes and communities.
Women are the biggest drivers of MSMEs across Sub-Saharan Africa. So, if a country is making electrification plans and they are not involving these people so as to cater to their needs, then there is a problem.
The other thing that I’m hoping to see is governments doing a lot more to help clean energy businesses become investment-ready. A lot of that work has been left to the private sector, but governments have a part to play because no investor will bring in their investment into an economy that is not stable.
If you have foreign exchange prices that are very volatile, it affects the people who want to import the panels and the batteries.
There’s a need to have a stable and enabling environment which includes dealing with issues around forex, insecurity, governance, and those sorts of things. Seeing all this gives investors confidence, and that’s basically what I would like to see.
Lastly, I want to see very vibrant clean energy ecosystems that are feeding off one another. This requires trust within the ecosystems of installers, developers, assemblers who are able to co-exist and feed off each other.
There has to be a lot of work to build that trust so that we can enter a trade; this is what the African Continental Free Trade is trying to do.
Looking at the African energy industry, what’s the connection between energy and gender?
When you look at poverty rates across Africa, women are the most impacted. When you look at the rates of energy poverty, women are still the most impacted.
There’s a lot of data to show this. You can’t have a continent where half of its population is perpetually in poverty. Let’s face it, that continent won’t grow.
Women are the ones driving medium and small-scale enterprises. They are the ones who run small-scale farms across the villages, and then take the proceeds to the markets to sell. If those women don’t have electricity, right, they are never going to get out of poverty.
They are never going to get out of having that one small farm where they are farming tubers of yam or vegetables. It’s going to be an endless cycle of poverty that will also affect their children because they are not able to give them good food, proper nutrition, and education.
When you have women being the most energy-poor across the continent, the fact is that poverty continues to perpetuate itself. But when you put electricity into the hands of a woman, she’s able to actually do work with it, start a business, grow the business, send her kids to school, and hire more employees.
The government will get revenue from her because she’s able to pay taxes, her staff is able to do likewise and everybody benefits. That’s what happens when you put electricity, especially clean energy, in the hands of women.
Give us an idea of where you hope to see the cleantech sector within the next five years.
- I hope to see entire communities electrified.
- I hope to see more productive use of clean energy to start businesses.
- I hope to see a lot more small businesses adopting clean energy as a way to grow their businesses.
- I hope to see governments support those small businesses because that’s a way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.
Watch this space as we’ll be having more interesting conversations with more and more industry experts.
Featured Image: Ifeoma Malo, Co-founder & CEO, Clean Technology Hub
