As part of a groundbreaking research effort, FP Analytics and the U.S. African Development Foundation are spotlighting pioneers in agriculture, off-grid energy, and entrepreneurship to highlight how African enterprises are innovating in the face of COVID-19 and contributing to local growth and stability. Profiles will be added to this page on a rolling basis. Hear more from USADF, investors, and entrepreneurs from across the continent by tuning into FP’s recent Virtual Dialogue, Profiles of Resilience.
Habiba Ali
CEO, SOSAI (Nigeria)
Sosai Renewable Energies Company is a woman-owned business expanding solar energy access in rural and peri-urban communities in northern Nigeria. When Habiba Ali founded the company in 2010, her primary mission was to reduce rural women’s use of kerosene lamps and cookstoves —which, when operated indoors, have the same effect on the lungs during just two hours of use as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes—by leasing and selling affordable solar lamps and clean-energy cookstoves. Having immediate impact, her business grew rapidly by word of mouth, as her first customers told friends and family about their new solar appliances and soon became the first salespeople in her network. Sosai’s network has expanded to over 150 women, and over the last decade it has reached an estimated 650,000 people through the installation of lamps, cookstoves, solar home kits, and now solar dryers and community-wide mini-grid infrastructure.
Habiba describes Sosai’s impact as twofold: First, it critically increases energy access in rural areas that remain completely disconnected from a consistent power supply. Expanding communities’ access to clean energy has not only led to improved health outcomes, particularly for the women who traditionally cooked with kerosene, but also provided a pathway to economic growth. Communities that have been reliant on subsistence agriculture, which has provided limited income, have been able to scale up their operations to include drying and processing, enabling their products to last longer and to be sold at higher prices, both domestically and internationally. Second, Sosai’s operations provide steady income to its all-female salesforce and an additional 200 youth who install appliances and infrastructure. Sosai’s network of women has gained the trust of local communities and is recognized as an employer and provider of economic opportunity, with the company serving as an important defense against youth radicalization, which remains a key concern in northern Nigeria. Now, amid COVID-19, the network is also a reliable and trustworthy source of public health information for communities.
Habiba credits much of Sosai’s recent success to the receipt of her first USADF grant in 2016, which funded the installation of 2 (Two) ten-kilowatt solar mini-grid, 2 solar dryers and solar kiosks in Baawa and Kadabo communities, Makarfi Local Government Areas, Kaduna State. Through monitoring the impacts of the mini-grids—including the tons of CO2 mitigated, increased economic activity within the community, and improved health outcomes due to clean air—her team has been able to clearly demonstrate the benefits of improved energy access to other communities throughout the region. Highlighting the economic and environmental impacts of this project has helped open doors to new opportunities and attract additional funding to scale Habiba’s business and expand the number of mini-grid projects in the region, including a new USADF grant in partnership with All On, which finances off-grid energy solutions in Nigeria. In addition to the funding itself, Habiba credits the impact of joining USADF’s network of grantees and alumni, which has given her the opportunity and platform to spread the message of her work and mission, including on panel events in the United States.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, disrupted Sosai’s work and delayed its timelines, the company has provided a critical resource—with Sosai’s existing customers eager to recharge their solar appliances in the face of a prolonged lockdown within their villages. Habiba has also focused her network of trusted saleswomen to distribute protective equipment, hand sanitizer, and public health information in rural communities, in partnership with the British government’s Department for International Development. While Habiba has big ideas for how to help her community during this period, specifically by providing solar power to isolation centers in rural areas, she has been unable to secure funding for such projects so far. In the future, Habiba aims to connect more northern Nigerian communities to solar power, but she still faces challenges, as a black woman, in gaining access to the same streams of development funding and equity investment as her male peers.