Why We Build in Nigeria: The Power of Being ‘Just Crazy Enough’
Written by Uchechukwu Ogechukwu
Seven years ago, I was an undergrad at the University of Nigeria with my friends, constantly thinking about the next big thing to build. As students and thinkers, we were always hunting for adventures beyond academic activities (something people would declare impossible to build). You know, the kind of project that would make people call us stubborn for refusing to give up!
What caught our attention was Nigeria's staggering energy poverty. Here, we had 200 million people in one country, over 100 university engineering departments, and hundreds of thousands of graduates churned out annually. Yet, somehow, we were supposed to believe that Nigeria's power problem couldn't be solved with all this abundant human resource? As my Dad would always say, "who will bail the cat?". So we began thinking about what we could do in these circumstances.
Now, much had happened before we arrived at this revelation. Several brilliant minds had already taken their shots at solutions. Individually, some had built small hydro power stations, others had gone the import route with fuel generators serving as power backups, while the rest had resigned themselves to depending on the notoriously unstable national grid for a (whopping) 4-hours of power per day. Finding our path through all this felt like what the Bible describes as "passing through the eye of a needle".
I won't bore you with all the historical details here (you’ll have to hold out for my autobiography for that!), but our burning desire to make a real change became the catalyst that propelled us to see a starting line. Not a path – a starting line. The path would be drawn as we walked it, so we believed.
Deciding on our first project was surprisingly easy. We founded Greenage Technologies with a simple but audacious mission: “Solve Nigeria's power problem using solar energy technologies in a way no one had ever attempted”. We weren't interested in just trimming branches, we wanted to uproot the entire tree of energy poverty. Our goal was to build the technology ourselves, learning from every available source of knowledge, ensuring the technology would be truly local and built to last.
My co-founder would always say: "Nigeria has always focused on cutting trunks instead of uprooting their problems". You can see this pattern everywhere. Take a country sitting on one of Africa's largest oil deposits, yet it couldn't maintain a functional oil refinery for years until the Dangote group, built and commissioned one about a year ago. Or look at how the country tackles poverty: handing out market money and similar quick fixes instead of building sustainable jobs in agriculture and manufacturing around our immense natural resources.
Was it a difficult decision for us? Not at all. Was it a challenging one? Absolutely. But it has led to some very meaningful results.
In our first year, we were incredibly lucky with local investor buy-ins. We gathered a whole host of believers who didn't see us as completely crazy, but as just crazy enough to support our idea. Fast forward one year and we were truly struck by our luck. We had raised over $157,000 in cash from Nigeria's most unspoken startup region (Enugu state), and in the most difficult and neglected sector of all: hardware manufacturing.
We set out to build smart solar inverters as our flagship product, incorporating a technology we called "sequential loader" for priority loading. This innovation was designed to accommodate people's insatiable energy needs, which rarely correlate with their financial capacity for solar projects.
Did the market receive us well?
The answer is a resounding yes. We thrilled the market with our locally made products, with presence in 22 out of Nigeria's 36 states plus the capital territory. We travelled extensively across these regions for sales and demonstrations, it was a sweet and melodious experience.
Then came the time to level up: building something bigger to serve Nigeria and Africa's billion-dollar energy market. We brought our investors onboard and were able to secure $500,000 investment to expand our production line and reach more markets.
Was this next stage successful?
You’ll just have to read my next blog post to find out. Over the course of two stories I’ll share, first, how our presence in Enugu catalysed numerous hardware startups across Nigeria and, second, the incredible (and somewhat unbelievable) story of how it took us three years to build our planned production facility with $500,000.
Trust me, it doesn't sound real but it is.
Uchechukwu Ogechukwu is a Gates Scholar and an MPhil in Technology Policy student at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He is a co-founder of Greenage Technologies, a startup using local technologies to drive solar energy adoption in Nigeria. He is also a co-founder of Hardware Garage where he works in innovation and start-up development. He is involved in various projects that has raised funding from several angel investors, VC, Innovate UK, UNIDO and the Royal Academy of Engineering.