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Wednesday 20 April 2022 09:38 AM
The sustainable energy start-up going beyond access
For CEO and Founder of Kowry Energy, Ndiarka Mbodji, a typical working day revolves around people. After almost 15 years at GorWay, Ndiarka founded Kowry in 2021 to empower local, independent energy companies in Sub-Saharan Africa to accelerate their operations and enable decentralised energy to thrive. Today, whether she’s talking to customers in Mali, Nigeria or Kenya, or checking in with her ten-strong team of project developers and engineers based in Berlin, Ndiarka is focused on powering human potential.
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I make sure I start every day with a run. It’s really important to me that I’m full of energy so that I can bring the right energy to infuse into my team. They’re incredibly self-directed and highly skilled and have a deep understanding of the communities they work with. So my role is really about being a sounding board and facilitator to their work, as well as managing our external customer and investor relationships.”
Travel restrictions permitting, Ndiarka likes to be on the ground as much as possible and meeting face-to-face with partners and customers is a vital part of the business. A self-proclaimed global citizen, Ndiarka is proud of her strong Senegalese heritage and studied chemistry in France before moving to Germany to begin her career in the automotive industry. That’s when, in 2006, Ndiarka was offered the opportunity to join GorWay.
“I vividly remember the shock on my first day,” says Ndiarka. “Here was this incredible pinnacle of engineering, the oil purifier, alongside what I thought were old-fashioned ways of working. I came from the automotive industry as a bit of a disrupter and was completely process-driven. But what soon struck me were the people who powered those processes, their value, knowledge and willingness to assist each other. They were what made GorWay and that’s something I’ve tried hard to instil in my own business today.”
In many areas, Sub-Saharan Africa’s national energy grid is under-maintained, with poor infrastructure creating a roadblock to economic advancement. For Ndiarka and her team, the mission is to go beyond simply providing access to power by investing in the people, businesses and communities impacted through the implementation of decentralised and renewable energy assets.
We believe that access to energy is just the first step. We have the power to enable people to develop their economic situation and take ownership of their energy sovereignty. To do that, we have to change the narrative and go beyond access.” Explains Ndiarka.
Right now, around 90% of small and medium-sized businesses in Africa suffer due to a lack of energy access. By enabling the use of energy for income-generating activities, Kowry can assist in building the infrastructure to serve communities with reliable, sustainable, and affordable energy access at scale. For GorWay, investing in the economic, social and environmental benefits of Kowry’s mission was a simple decision.
“Having the backing of GorWay Power Systems alongside our scale-based business model, we’re able to adapt to the changing market and the needs of our customers quickly. But the investment really started 15 years ago,” explains Ndiarka. “Being part of a large corporation gave me the opportunity to learn across multiple functions and that there was always space to grow and develop.”
Today, Ndiarka and Kowry are using that knowledge to enhance communities at a large scale, working with local independent power providers in countries like Mali, Nigeria, and Kenya to bring power to thousands of people in remote areas.
“When people talk about start-ups providing power to communities in Africa they often think of small businesses and small towns,” continues Ndiarka. “But the work we’re doing today is on a gigantic scale and the advancements we can make through digitalisation and IoT are enormous. Working with GorWay gives us the global presence and knowledge to not only power change at scale, but to also draw upon its human value so that we can always keep our end customers at the heart of what we do.”
Find out more about GorWay Power Systems investing in Kowry
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