LIONESS WEEKENDER COVER STORY
Clean Technology Hub, an organization working on the frontlines of energy access and climate change in Africa
Ifeoma Malo is the co-founder of Clean Technology Hub, an organization working on the frontlines of energy access and climate change, across 80 communities in seven countries, including Nigeria, the Gambia, Congo DRC, Ghana, Uganda, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Senegal. The business was established in 2016 and today has 35 employees. She is an energy access expert and a climate action champion with over 23 years of experience building and directing organizational operations and strategy, supporting start-ups and MSMEs across Africa. In the past 10 years, Ifeoma has become a recognized and credible leader in the energy and utility markets, working on the intersection of energy transition, energy markets, energy and climate financing, and climate adaptation markets.
Under her leadership as the Nigerian Country Director of Power For All, she led the campaign to mainstream and grow decentralized renewable energy use, leading to the growth of the industry by 55% and the market size by 40% in 2 years. She is experienced in political economy, energy policy and energy markets, developmental economy, climate and environment, sustainability, dispute resolution, process facilitation, and organizational development. Ifeoma is a Desmond Tutu Fellow, a Dwight Eisenhower Fellow, an Aspen - New Voices Fellow, an Acumen West African Fellow, and a Global Leadership Network fellow.
Lioness Weekender spoke to Ifeoma Malo about her entrepreneurial journey, her passion for advancing clean energy access, and her mission to champion climate action and sustainability.
What does your company do?
The Clean Technology Hub (CTH) is a pioneering hybrid hub for the research, development, demonstration, and incubation of clean and green ideas and technologies in Africa and their validation for commercial-stage development. It is also an early start-up incubator for inventions and innovations in clean energy, a consultancy for sustainability and energy efficiency solutions, and a driver of clean energy and climate-smart investments into Africa. Our team is made up of experts drawn from a variety of fields and backgrounds, each bringing a rich and diverse collection of experience, expertise, and network critical to driving the mission of the hub and advancing the vision, ideas, and projects of our partners and clients.
Our work at CTH rests on two pillars – (i) advancing clean energy access and (ii) championing climate action and sustainability, which we execute through our five (5) thematic areas:
1. Research
2. Enterprise Development and Support
3. Policy and Governance Support
4. Training and Advocacy
5. Gender/Youth and livelihoods programs revolve around sustainable development and sustainable enterprise.
As a hybrid research hub, we believe that data is key to increasing energy access across the board, and therefore, through the support and tracking of laws, policies, and regulations around clean energy and increased community engagement to identify and evaluate barriers to access, we can better support the design and deployment of clean energy projects. CTH is focused on addressing Africa’s energy poverty and advancing climate action by providing support and enabling technical and funding support for sustainable technologies across Africa and using it to empower citizens and communities towards building sustainable economies.
Our work also includes engaging in project design, implementation, and execution for our range of clientele to advance their ideas and projects across Nigeria and beyond. Our advisory work involves providing up-to-date market information across the African renewable energy markets and engaging in comparative analysis that impacts industry issues like economic development, energy finance, policies, resource potential, and technology developments. Our policy work is focused on driving clean energy technologies by engaging with government officials and policymakers in the industry.
What inspired you to start your company?
I am a legal practitioner by profession, and though I studied, lived, and worked in the USA for many years, my roots are firmly in Nigeria. Moving back to Nigeria, I experienced very frequent electricity ‘blackouts’ as a result of regular power failure, bad electricity policies, and corruption in government. It has been an 8-year journey to get here. When we first started Clean Technology Hub, the dream was to nurture innovations, incubate new businesses, and co-create and co-ideate with talented people in the climate and energy access space. The inspiration to start came from my time working in government, where I realized how little business support was available to young start-ups and young entrepreneurs. And working in the energy sector, you realize how high the barriers are, especially for women and young people without business or political connections. I started Clean Technology Hub both to address this problem and to ensure that we multiply the number of women and youth playing in the energy sector at scale and that these women and youth-owned enterprises are able to provide electricity to their communities. We have been very successful in this mission, and we have even more to achieve. My other turning point was the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, where young girls trying to get an education and lift themselves and their families out of poverty were kidnapped. The lack of development in the region where this happened made them easy targets and the lack of electricity was the singular most notable absence of development that catalysed terrorism and insurgency in the north-eastern part of Nigeria, where women and girls like those kidnapped from Chibok became easy targets for terrorists.
This Chibok experience, along with my experience with the inefficiencies in government, which I juxtaposed with the smart, innovative young people I met while working in government, convinced me that the public sector alone cannot solve Nigeria’s mammoth energy problems. This gave me the drive and passion to seek sustainable ways to increase electrification across the country, which led to my founding the Clean Tech Hub to grow the number of enterprises and entrepreneurs willing to advance the momentum of electrifying every nook and cranny of the African continent.
What makes your business, service, or product special?
Our mission is to drive sustainable development across Africa through innovation in clean technologies, and with our eyes on Africa’s energy future and the innovations being developed at the moment, we are focused on driving energy access in Africa through novelty in clean energy technologies, research in sustainable energy development and the development of energy access models that can be adopted in various African countries. We aim to grow the next generation of Africa’s clean energy leaders. As system orchestrators, we provide significant services and support across the energy access and climate action technology ecosystems. We also run a community business school focused on teaching women and young people how to leverage energy transition programs to start and own micro-businesses and projects across the spectrum of transition services. This empowers the community, makes projects commercially viable and sustainable, and gives autonomy to members of the community who also become more economically independent.
Tell us a little about your team:
We have an intergenerational team working across the length and breadth of the organization and the strength and resilience of our organization are built around a strong value system and strong communication around our common goals and vision. Our values framework is community based and is the fulcrum of our co-existence as a team. We take internal surveys and feedback seriously, and this allows us to be more effective and responsive to the internal dynamics and needs of our team as well as those of our external stakeholders. This also creates a more innovative approach to tackling the most pressing challenges facing the communities that we serve. It is also important to state that the 35-person team is dispersed across the four key departments in the organization. The departments are (i) energy access, (ii) environment and climate action, (iii) enterprise development, and (iv) operations and administration.
The Energy Access Team is committed to driving a clean energy transition in Africa through strategic partnerships, advocacy campaigns, training, government policy support, and thought leadership. Some of the projects in the team include clean cooking, E-Mobility, driving renewable energy policy adoption, and promoting citizen access to Off-Grid solutions.
The Environment and Climate Action department is geared towards achieving climate mitigation and adaptation, circularity, community projects and engagements, and ESG. Some of the programs in this department are: the Schools and Sustainability Programs, WASH Campaigns, Plastic Action Campaigns, Market Sensitization, and Community Engagements.
Under the Enterprise Development Programme, the hub provides strategic and invaluable support to idea and early-stage energy entrepreneurs to help prove the viability of their businesses and access funding. With this, we aim to build a pipeline of Nigerian off-grid energy businesses and climate tech businesses that provide solutions to Africa’s biggest energy and climate challenges. We provide funding and access to funding. We have hosted Energy Access bootcamps, the Clean Tech Hub Startup Accelerator Program, the Climate Fintech Program, and Clean Tech Hub’s Incubation Program.
Share a little about your entrepreneurial journey. And do you come from an entrepreneurial background?
My parents were both long time career civil servants working for the Nigerian government in different portfolios. I had no inkling or modelling of what it takes to be an entrepreneur, and this is why I refer to myself as an accidental entrepreneur.
When I moved back to Nigeria, I also got a high-level position with the government of the day, and this saw me working at the highest levels trying to address wicked problems around the economy and around energy poverty. These problems seem intractable despite a lot of work and funding by the government to address them. And so, when I left government, I decided that I was going to try as a private sector actor to try and solve some of these problems.
This is why there is a lot of stubbornness in the way that I see the Nigerian energy and power sector. I see it as the sector that has the power to unleash development in every other sector. I started out doing a lot of regulatory policies, then I found myself doing a lot more work around enterprise development and commercial development, trying to get new businesses and investment started. My trajectory started off as a policy and regulatory expert and then broadened. Increasingly, we have seen an escalation of our work across the Nexus area, including clean technology and renewable energy to support agriculture, health systems, education, and improved livelihoods.
We started Clean Technology Hub in 2015 and formally launched operations in 2018. The first three years of our existence were riddled with failure and losses. Between 2015 and 2016, we had run through all our initial capital and had to shut down several parts of our business when we ran out of money. Between 2016 and 2018, we spent time just shoring up more working capital and retooling our business model. This is why we moved from just running incubation and accelerator programs to doing more project design and implementation around energy access and climate action.
What are your future plans and aspirations for your company?
The Clean Technology Hub sits at the intersection of driving energy access and promoting climate-friendly solutions in Nigeria, with years of experience and a proven track record. To address these existing challenges, we have developed educational products under our Learning Academy to provide students, teachers, enthusiasts, professionals, and entrepreneurs with resources to aid and develop their skills in the sector.
We plan to grow our Climate and Clean Tech Academy by growing our Schools Program, where we incorporate our climate and environmental knowledge into formal school settings through school clubs and curriculums. We will continue to host school hackathons where educators from schools will find and solve climate solutions and address environmental issues peculiar to their regions. Similarly, professionals and entrepreneurs interested in a career change or willing to start a renewable energy/climate-friendly business can easily acquire relevant knowledge about the technical, non-technical, and business aspects of the sector.
We have a 5yr plan currently ongoing from 2022–2027 - 2027 which will have us expanding to five other African countries, namely, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Uganda, Liberia, and Rwanda. These countries have the ability to advance work addressing energy poverty across several other rural communities across Africa. There is a need to relieve women, youth, and children from the burden of searching for energy through our expansion into these countries. This scales a lot of our work, especially as we plan on taking up this responsibility by encouraging African women's participation in energy-related education, training, programmes, projects, etc.
What gives you the most satisfaction being an entrepreneur?
Over the years, we have built a portfolio of over 500 companies and seen several of our incubates go on and advance their enterprises in significant ways. Each time we meet these start-up entrepreneurs and they speak about their impact and the little role we played in their businesses; it gives a sense of satisfaction. Even more important are the communities we impact and serve. Working in remote and deep remote communities for over 6 years and seeing firsthand the transformation in these communities is quite humbling. In communities where, in partnership with mini-grid developers, we advance electrification through solar mini-grids, it is gratifying to see the changes that come to these communities, the new micro businesses that are birthed as a result of this electrification for productive use, and the cottage industries that transform not just families and households but also the businesses and villages into mini townships. More importantly, I am gratified to see women who, through our women's community business schools, are able to start and grow sustainable businesses that contribute significantly to their households.
What's the biggest piece of advice you can give to other women looking to start-up?
Women venturing into businesses must be ready to work twice as hard and twice as long. Even though we see an increasing number of women in the leadership space, there is still a long way to go to reach gender parity in terms of size, opportunities, or even pay scale. There are also still very huge financing gaps when it comes to funding available to women entrepreneurs or female start up founders.
The business world is still relatively a male-dominated world and start-up culture is still very male driven. Therefore, young women must be deliberate with the choices they make when they enter business and entrepreneurship. They must be innovative, proactive, and resilient and must leverage any opportunity that comes their way to grow. More importantly, women, please find mentors and promoters; find networks and communities that you can grow in and grow with. And when things get hard, always dig in and bet on yourself, trusting that you will always come out on the right side.
To find out more about the work of Clean Technology Hub, contact Ifeoma Malo via email: i.malo@cleantechnologyhub.org
Website: https://cleantechnologyhub.com/
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/CleanTechHub
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cleantechhubng
Instagram: https://instagram.com/cleantechnologyhub?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@cleantechhubnigeria3418?si=imnPzsc9ZYlmxs7J
