“Only 14% of committed mini-grid funding has actually been disbursed.” That figure should stop every energy conversation in its tracks. I have spent years travelling through African communities where...
I grew up counting nights by how dark they felt. In our part of Nigeria, as in most parts of Africa, darkness was not just the absence of light; it was a condition that shaped behaviour. When the sun...
I still remember the first time I saw electricity reach a village.It was late in the 1990s, and I was a boy visiting my grandmother’s house in Cross River State, Nigeria. A single light bulb...
Every year, the rains come and go. The villagers gather at the same broken borehole, filling buckets from puddles that the government once promised to replace with solar-powered pumps. Somewhere in...
There is a sound I remember from my childhood, not the noise of generators or the crackle of candles, but the soft murmur of neighbours talking in the dark. Entire evenings lit only by moonlight or...
When I think about the childhoods many African children are living today, I am transported back to my own: a small house, a kerosene lantern that flickered more than it shone, and the low, constant...
There is a photograph I keep in my mind, a memory rather than an image. It is of a dusty road in the Niger Delta, the air thick with the smell of gas flaring in the distance. As a young boy, I...
I have walked through towns where the ground is rich, but the people are not. Places where the earth underneath your feet could power the world’s clean-energy future, yet the homes beside the road...
Not long ago, I stood near a primary school building in northern Nigeria. A technician was fastening a solar panel to the roof of one of the school buildings. The schoolyard buzzed with the laughter...
When negotiators at COP30 announced new climate-finance commitments in Belém, my mind went to the children I met earlier this year in a village outside Makurdi, Nigeria, six boys and girls bent over...
When I spoke to a senior human-resources lead at a major solar-energy company early this year, I expected standard answers: “We need more graduates,” “We lack training,” “We need government...
Africa is gaining clean-energy capacity at a pace unmatched in its modern history. From Morocco’s vast Noor solar complex to Kenya’s wind farms, South Africa’s rooftop boom, and Nigeria’s swelling...