GoodGeist
A podcast on sustainability, hosted by Damla Özlüer and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network. Looking at sustainability issues, communications, and featuring global guests from a wide variety of sectors such as business, NGOs and government.
GoodGeist
An Eco-entrepreneur in Africa – Jodie Wu
Meet Jodie Wu, a pioneering clean tech entrepreneur in Africa who reveals for us the transformative power of sustainable innovation.
When Jodie graduated from MIT and packed her bags for Africa, she thought she'd be gone for six months. Sixteen years later, she's still there, having built multiple successful social enterprises that are revolutionizing access to clean energy and water in remote communities. As CEO of OffGridBox, she's developed a containerised solution that can be rapidly deployed to bring solar power and clean water to areas conventional infrastructure can't reach.
While global investment in renewable energy has surpassed $1.3 trillion, a mere fraction of that reaches healthcare facilities—despite 60% of health centres in sub-Saharan Africa functioning without reliable electricity. Off-Grid Box bridges this gap by providing 24/7 solar power to rural health facilities, enabling life-saving equipment to function consistently rather than relying on expensive, unreliable diesel generators.
Also via W Power, Jodie's creating pathways for female engineers to gain technical experience and leadership roles in energy projects across the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond.
Listen in to discover how a simple solar-powered box is saving lives, empowering communities, and proving that climate solutions can be delivered today—even in the most challenging contexts.
Follow GoodGeist for more episodes on sustainability, communications and how creativity can help make the world a better place.
Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello everyone. You are listening to Good Ge Guys, the message on sustainability which is brought to you by the DNS Network, the global network of agencies dedicated to making the world a better place. This is Damla from Mira Agency, Istanbul, and.
Speaker 3:This is Steve from Creative Concern in Manchester. This podcast series explores global sustainability issues, how they're communicated and what creativity can do to make positive change happen.
Speaker 2:So in this episode we're going to talk to Judy Wu, ceo of Off Grid Box, a disruptive clean tech startup from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Judy is a serial eco-entrepreneur and a graduate of MIT.
Speaker 3:I made that intro. I typed that bit for you, damledon, I made it quite a tongue twister. Off Grid Box aims to provide clean water and solar energy to remote communities in East Africa. Jodie is an engineer by background Interesting, let's get into that and an entrepreneur who drove straight into social enterprise straight out of college. An entrepreneur who drove straight into social enterprise straight out of college. Now based out of tanzania and rwanda, jody delivers projects across central and east africa with a focus on powering health centers with off-grid boxes, top-of-the-line technology amazing um, and I should say damla um. It's one of the eco innovations that the astrian charity has been showcasing, uh, during london climate week. So j it is so lovely to meet you and thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
Speaker 2:Thank you. So first of all, jodie, we love to hear your story. Tell us about your journey to becoming a cleantech entrepreneur. It sounds inspiring, actually, Sure, sure.
Speaker 4:So I guess you can say I got into engineering from the time I was a kid, or if you can call Legos engineering, that's where it all started. But I ended up at MIT, as I already mentioned, when I went to college and did the whole standard internships where you go work for a civil engineering firm, a nuclear firm, energy firm, and was thinking how do I have a bigger impact in what I do? And I was like I cannot stay in a cubicle. So I was fortunate that there was a program called D-Lab, whereby it was created by an alum from the 80s who came back to create the program she would have wanted when she was in college, which was basically going into developing countries and building and co-creating solutions with local communities. So she did Peace Corps in Botswana and basically had created this D-Lab or development program for students to start to transition into it. Little did I know I'd do all the classes, I'd win a business competition, I'd go to Africa thinking it was going to be like a six-month thing or a one-year thing, and go back Africa thinking it was going to be like a six month thing or one year thing and go back to grad school. But now it's been 16 years, so that's fast forwarding quite a bit. In terms of, I did have the like, oh my gosh, I took the GMATs and I'm not going to college. And then I did the whole like, oh, I'm turning 30 and I'm still in Tanzania. And then now I'm just like, okay, tanzania is my home, I've done a circuit around all of it.
Speaker 4:But in terms of the clean tech aspect, I think I just happened to be there at the right time, in the sense of this is in 2009, 2010, 2011. This is when the price in solar was starting to get cheaper. Kerosene was still used widely across Africa, cell phones were just normal cell phones, not even smartphones were just starting to enter the market, and Africa is really leapfrogging these different elements, and so the reason I fell into solar energy was because I was going to villages trying to sell my tech. I was actually doing bicycle powered tech, agricultural tech, so sort of like how do you make technology cheaper and share it among communities? And then I needed a solar light. So I happened to have a solar light that was given to me at a conference. Little did I know that it was given to me by a company that would now become the biggest solar pay-as-you-go company in the world. They're called Sun King. So I had one of the first Sun Kings ever to be made, because they were also founded in 2008. They now sell like tens of millions of products a year.
Speaker 4:So I think, fast forward to that story, people would try to buy my solar lights instead of my agricultural technology, which led me to transition to selling solar lights. So I sold solar lights through a network of entrepreneurs for eight years and then, going back to my turning 30 crisis, then I ended up selling my company to Sun King. So this original free solar light I got from a college thing. It was actually founded by two grads from I always confuse Northeastern and Northwestern but the one based in Chicago and oh no, they were actually from University of Illinois Urbana campaign. So they're still running the company till today. So they actually acquired my company and I joined them in new products and services.
Speaker 4:So how do you take things beyond clean energy? Once someone has established a record of paying for solar over time, what else can I pay for? So that became smartphones, that became water tanks, it became clean cook stoves, water filters. So it was really neat to be doing this mechanical engineering stuff. Um, from a context of how do you widen a product portfolio. And then I did that for three years. I would say I was acquihired and I was like I can't work in a big organization. Things move too slowly. I off grid box recruited me to be Well, I was just going to be a consultant of off grid box recommend me to join their team um full-time, and so now I'm their, their CEO, and I can talk about that more in later.
Speaker 3:Amazing, yeah, do. Well, I mean, apart from that, I, I know incredible down there, isn't it? Well, I? And also I want to know more about the bicycle powered agricultural tech. That sounds really exciting. I love that, but let's stay focused, focused, focused um. So off-grid box jody um brings affordable clean water, renewable energy to anybody anywhere, so tell us about the transformation. Off-grid box delivers wonderful.
Speaker 4:So, in terms of why I loved off-grid box and why I made the leap, is actually a lot of off-grid boxes model is around bringing community level solar and clean water. So when I was with Sun King, it was a lot around like how do you do this straight to the household? And realizing a lot of those are actually very, very expensive to buy a product. I mean, even though it's been optimized to be as cheap as possible, it's still expensive for the $2 a day client. So with Off Grid Box, we were focused on bringing services and how do we put this asset on the ground, whereby these services would help pay for the operations and maintenance, so that it's not just a tech that's dropped in, but a tech that's continued to be operated and maintained by someone who is local in that area. So Off Grid Box was founded in 2017. With this, the founders had actually been in the doing solar farms across North Africa and Europe, so they're already very specialized in that. But they found themselves doing projects where they had to go further, further field, like to South Africa to to solarize their school and they realized, oh, we go. How do we deploy this in a rapid way? Because if you're actually going to do solar from scratch. It's like you need to do a load assessment when you arrive. You need to check the roof structure Can you mount things on the roof, is there even a technical room? And so, realizing those are the small things that tend to take a lot of time, and so how could we reduce this installation time to as quickly as possible? So, when I joined the off-grid box team in 2019 as a consultant, we went to deploy 12 boxes in 10 villages and we did that in two weeks. So it was very incredible, because I consider you open up this containerized solution, this two meter by two meter, two meters like opening a present and then you just mount the solar panels and then you connect the batteries, and then you connect the water system and then, voila, you have everything in place. So it was really magical and I loved it, because I had been an engineer in doing products, but I had not used a spanner and a wrench and all these other tools in a very long time, so it was really nice to, even though I was hired for business development on that side, I also became a technician on that project as well. So, yeah, so I think just to fast forward a bit more.
Speaker 4:As you mentioned in the intro, we are powering health care and we that story is when COVID came. No one could turn a blind eye to health, and so we realized that our community kiosks were actually applicable to powering health facilities. And so we started to do that, where the anchor load or the large load of the solar was for the health facility and then the rest was going to the community selling water and selling. We have our power banks, which we call our walking grid, where people could come charge their power banks and then they have lighting at home and could charge their phones at home. So that powering healthcare has just been building and building on itself. So as we go to more and more remote areas, we do have to, unfortunately, get rid of the container, but we keep the prefabricated elements of it, but it still allows. It keeps all the philosophies of off-grid box in terms of rapid deployment.
Speaker 2:Rapid, fast, effective. I think the thing you aspired when you left the corporate life was actually this right.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think no one ever. Well, my parents definitely didn't expect me to never come back. Yeah. I would turn to another aspect I would turn to another aspect.
Speaker 2:You've talked pretty powerfully, Jody, about how investment in renewables in Africa simply doesn't always reach the front line where it's needed no-transcript.
Speaker 4:Yeah, certainly so, also being in the right time and space. In 2009, 2010, there was sort of the shift in terms of like books like Dead Aid came out and like Out of Poverty and all these books that were talking about how development had been done wrong and that we should be shifting towards this mind around social enterprise and how there's a triple bottom line of these having finances, having your financial, environmental as well as impacts all online. So what I've realized, now that it's been 16 years later, is there has been no Silicon Valley unicorns or I don't know the equivalent in the UK but no unicorns coming out on the Africa side, except for in the fintech sector. There's been a lot of progress, like mobile money, in those fields. I think it's also very similar to why Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley. It's for electronics, but in terms of on the Africa side, it has really been about okay, how do you reach scale? How do you have a price that's as low as possible? How do you reach scale where that you can afford to pay the salaries? And then there's this third element, or dynamic of at what time are you gouging the customer versus? Should it have been a donation to begin with?
Speaker 4:So I think that's a whole debate and we could have a whole nother podcast about that, but I think that's what I realized and why what off-grid box is so important is that from a commercial perspective, there is a lot of infrastructure that needs to go to very difficult to reach, areas that a single household appliance is not going to solve. As well as we need to recognize that infrastructure is like a public, global good that is typically subsidized already, so it's not something that's commercial. So to also have people pay that burden when it's a failure of their own government is kind of I guess the dynamic is not how it should be. So that's what I mean by does it always reach the front line is because the further you go, the bigger the need, the more expensive the costs and then it's no longer investable. So where off-grid box and sort of like that magic spot is is we go where we can install infrastructure, where it might not cover the capex of the technology because it's infrastructure. I mean it's just like in all of our countries. Did you pay for the power poles that are going up there? Did you pay for the infrastructure?
Speaker 4:Yes, and taxes, but in countries as big as the DRC, which borders eight countries. It's nine countries, it's a very large country that they haven't even done a census in the past 40 years. That is how difficult it is to manage a country of that size, especially when you have one border you're part of the southern part of Africa, one border you're part of Eastern Africa, the other border you're part of Western Africa. So there's all these other elements at play.
Speaker 4:So I think, going back to the renewables, when you actually look at the sector, over $1.3 trillion has been invested in solar, solar energy but like less than 0.1 percent of that is actually going to health care and actually over 60 percent of the health facilities in sub-saharan africa have no power. So it's kind of like health is the foundation of everything, yet none of that money is going towards health, or very, very little, little, and so sort of where Off Grid Box has found ourselves is that we are in a place where no one can deny that saving lives it should be the penultimate or ultimate goal, and that's why we're doing what we do.
Speaker 3:Do you? I was going to ask about that, jodie, I also think, sorry, I can't get the image of your parents out of my head wondering whether you're coming back. I'm sorry, I've gone completely backwards, but it is relevant to what you've just been saying, because I think I hear in your voice somebody who's completely addicted to the incredible impact you're making every time you do this. It must be astounding to see this kind of direct impact that you can make and and I think that's what keeps you there is literally every day you're making a difference, so why wouldn't you? Um, so sorry, mum and dad not coming back, um, but um, I wanted to ask you about some of that, because what's really interesting when we look at projects like yours and some of the others that Ashton has been showcasing?
Speaker 3:Um, it was last week, last week, wasn't it London Climate Week? Um, there's a strong emphasis on the co-benefits of climate action and you're talking all about. You're talking about health care there, um, really powerfully and really compellingly. In fact, fact, you barely mentioned the climate crisis, and I think what's do you think this is the way we can accelerate action on climate is to pitch hard on those co-benefits like clean water, better healthcare, that sort of thing, being able to charge your mobile phone 100%.
Speaker 4:I think what's been sort of the gap, what's on the market even going back to your previous question is this frontline money. Reaching the frontline is is that right now in the DRC, people are spending a lot of money just to power the generators that are running these hospitals and they're not even able to use these generators for more than a couple of hours because fuel is costly. In the middle of the Congo it's over $3 per liter, which is I should compare it to UK prices. So apologies if it's cheaper, but my assumption is it's more expensive. But I think in that context and then to imagine like because it's relying on logistics, that where there is not necessarily a road most of the time and it's not accessible in the rain, there are times where there is no fuel to be found, so it makes the healthcare situation an extremely vulnerable place.
Speaker 4:In terms of the climate crisis, I think what's really interesting in the DRC is it actually is like a win-win-win. I think a lot of times when we talk about climate, we talk about like, oh, we have to invest in this and invest in that, and it's like actually, if someone would just finance this, this would be the next acceleration, because people are already paying a lot and solar is actually cheaper for them than to continue running the generator and they can provide their patients with 24-7 power and not having to do oil maintenance and not having to switch between different sources and not having to worry about power fluctuations where it spikes because there's suddenly a big load, a low load and burns up their biomedical equipment. So it's very much around. I mean, it's like it's not only a climate crisis, but we can do the climate smart thing to address this, this crisis, and I think, looking at it hand in hand. So there's a lot of conversations that has to happen in the sense of we know there's a lot of money going into health, but how much of that money going into health is actually effective if it's all going, if it's going to places that actually don't have power and if it's going to places that have no operations and maintenance plan to continue to support it?
Speaker 4:So I think this goes back to my 2010, 2009 stories of like there's dead aid and there's all these like social enterprise stuff, and I think we had wanted to leapfrog into being like, oh, we can do this all commercially when reality. There has to be something blended about that and I think that's the opportunity is, as we and you probably already did other sessions about this. But what's interesting about this even climate financing and if we even look at carbon credits is a lot of this requires data and how we're displacing CO2 and all of this. And what's interesting is it's like M&E that used to not have monitoring and evaluation, that used to not have a revenue stream to continue monitoring and evaluation to ensure systems keep running. So I think there's a lot of cool stuff in the future and a lot of different opportunities that could open up, and I think, in terms of the climate crisis, I just wish everyone was seeing that it's the logical thing to do.
Speaker 4:It's it's. I think. People usually think crisis means like you're dealing with a very difficult, difficult problem, which is true, but it also doesn't require difficult, difficult effort to address it, because there's companies like ourselves already in the DRC that are doing it. We just need that upfront investment or capital investment or public infusion to let things flow public infusion to let things flow.
Speaker 3:That was beautifully put. Beautifully put, I think, damla did you want to come in.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, as you imagine, because I want to stay on the finance part. Throughout the all episodes we've done so far more than a year now and we always see the phrase follow the money. Okay, how do we spend it? How do we share it? That's always my question, and Steve always makes me ask the financial question because he knows where I'm going to go.
Speaker 2:But you said I think, two questions before. You said that the fastest growing infrastructure was the financial infrastructure, so it has been rapidly developing in Africa. That also sparked in my mind a report that Oxfam has released on January this year. Say that richest 1% in the global North extracted 30 million an hour from the global South through the financial system in 2023. So they just merged it in my head. So we need to change this low too, and what you're trying to say or do is kind of changing it by eco-investing in Africa. So part of the message last week and now was that the investment model for eco-innovation in Africa wasn't working, even though there is an incredible spirit of entrepreneurship to be found. So if you had a magic wand keeping all these in mind, what would you change about the way that the world invests in projects like yours?
Speaker 4:Wonderful. So I would start with so right now, I guess, when I look at the sector, I think the biggest problem is there's too many silos, so it's like there's public sector or private sector and it's and they don't talk to each other, not realizing that they're completely mutually beneficial. So I think what's sad is it feels like the public sector is competition to the private sector, because here you put in your infrastructure investment and then at any moment public sector can bring power, so then they no longer need solar in this space. So it's really about like how do we start to have those conversations? I think even even me us being in clean water and clean energy, at our last, uh, the last conference on energizing healthcare, it was like why is there not an e-wash sector of we're talking about energy and water? Because they don't happen independently of each other, especially when you look at health. Um, you can't have clean water without energy, that's period and you can't have life without water. So it's all very much intertwined. So I think part of it is how do we start these conversations around bringing these different funding sources together? So a lot of what Off Grid Box is looking at right now is there's donor sector donating a lot of money already-grid box is looking at right now is there's donor sector donating a lot of money already but there's no accountability of how that money is going.
Speaker 4:I think I'll speak as an American. That's why USAID is gone right. So it's it's really around. How do you bring in that private sector? Like accountability, we need to keep the customers, who are the people on the ground, happy and getting the service they need and then making more effective use of this money that's being donated by or funded by the public sector, so ensuring that the public sector money is having the impact that it should be having. So it's kind of like also this conversation of investors why do investors want to invest in something that should be the public sector investing in it? So how do we start to open up those conversations or at least see how do we blend these roles or is it a new field altogether? Like, is it a new sector? It's not public or private. I mean, we have public private partnerships, but you know how does that become a more centralized part of everything?
Speaker 4:And I think this also goes to like one of the coolest things. I'm just going to mention it because I have an opportunity that we're doing in DRC is we're a consortium of partners that we're powering health facilities. That consortium involved the Ministry of Health, which shares us all the health data. Maybe they shouldn't be so, maybe they shouldn't have said that, but we know which facilities have reduced mortality, which facilities are getting more patients, and we're pairing that with the. So I don't have access to the data, but the university does, because they're sharing all the knowledge from private sector and public sector and combining them. So just be like oh, when, Jodi, or when, Off-grid box, when we go to install this solar system, the number of patients at this facility doubled, or the mortality reduced by X percent or Y percent.
Speaker 4:So we're even getting ready to do an RCT, or we're hoping, knock on wood, that an RCT comes through to look at even how does having an oxygen machine that's running 24-7 save lives? It should be. The answer should be obvious, but there's never been. There's not the data rigor in the country yet to like encourage health sector to put in lots of money. So I think going back to that health sector is donating all these oxygen machine machines, but do they actually know that 70% of them are broken? Do they actually think about oh, this broke in six months instead of two years. So it's kind of how do we blend this all together in terms of like energy? The energy sector enables the health sector and that private sector can ensure that the public sector's goals are achieved, because we don't operate on project timelines, we operate for the life of the customer and their needs.
Speaker 3:It's a very powerful model of chain investment and impact, and I know Damla is holding back from going into what happened to USAID. I'm holding back from a kind of global critique of capitalism, jodie, and how what you've just described is a wonderful use of the world's resources. Meanwhile, somebody right now is clicking to get themselves 30 deliveries of fast fashion tomorrow which will probably end up in a landfill site. So we want to invest in your kind of change and not crap. But, um, I'm going to move us on a little bit and we're almost at the end, but I just did want to ask you about, um, uh, your another strand of your work which I've noticed, which is making the energy sector a platform for empowerment and where women can shine as leaders and innovators and decision makers, and we're all about women and women's being empowered on this podcast, so tell us a bit about that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so one of the amazing things, or not amazing things?
Speaker 4:I should say of working in the DRC is I've never felt the male domination in the energy space as strong as there in terms of realizing that, oh, when I go to the social circles in the energy space, I'm the only lady there. Oh, when there's technicians on the ground, there are no female technicians there. Oh, there's actually women in universities, but none of them are getting jobs, despite all the training programs by different NGOs, government agencies. It's a struggle and I think it's also because there's culture to fight as well. In terms of historically like, in the DRC there's a large population where you've reached the pinnacle of your life when you've married. It's like now you don't have to work and I'm like, but what if you know all the other bad things you can think about? And I'm like, but what if you know all the other bad things you can think about? So how to how to find that independence? So, in terms of what we did in DRC, which we were really excited about is in DRC we helped set up I guess I might as well call it a new co, it's called a, it's called W Power, where its focus was really about how do we get women in the energy sector and how do we ensure that all the women that we hire or all the projects that we do involve women in the implementation.
Speaker 4:One of the things that I learned early on at Off Grid Box is women empowerment has always been central to what we do. But when you do a good job training women, they get poached right away. So it was kind of like okay, well, how do we embrace this and increase the funnel of talent coming in, or the funnel of identifying talent, so that when they're poached it's actually a success story and not a negative thing for organizations? So usually for the projects we do, they're usually multiple sites. Projects we do, they're usually multiple sites. So what we end up doing is in the first we do a recruitment of people in the technical sector, usually with the help of the universities that are there. Typically, a lot of them have no experience, so we do like a theoretical training and then it's a real training, but it's on the theory part I love that.
Speaker 3:It's so totally surreal. We train them in theory, but it never happens.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we train them and so like from there we're able to see, okay, who is ready to go to field and how can we work in the field. So basically seeing, I think just like looking for the qualities of what you'd want to find on your own team. So when we do do the installations, we engage two to four women and usually by the end of it one of them is the last one standing who then becomes our point of contact for the after sales in terms of managing all those partners. But it does require a lot of extra effort because a lot of these women have not even been given the opportunity to climb on a roof and we do have to deal with men who are not keen on working with these women.
Speaker 4:So we're basically, I'm sorry you can't be in this project, but it's not the cheaper thing to do for us, it's not the efficient way to do for us, but we realize that, especially when you look at all this donor funding coming in, it's really horrible if less than 10% of that money is going to the pockets of women, which is the reality of majority of the projects that are happening on the African content, reality of majority of the projects that are happening on the, on the African content.
Speaker 4:So so what we've found with WPOWER was a really special opportunity to really tackle that directly. And so even even this this new co the co-founders are two other engineers, one's in telecommunications engineer and other one's electrical engineer and so we've come together as engineers from three different countries who have three different first languages that are just aligned on that, aligned on that ethos. But it's definitely not easy because you have to start with a track record. So all of our track records are in our first companies. But usually when you do this kind of thing, it's a 10-year journey, so we look at it, or 20-year journey, or 30-year journey, so we look at it for the long term.
Speaker 2:So it's not cheaper, it's not easier, but it is the good way to do this. So that's why, we are in awe of you, jodi, and I'm so sorry to say that we have to wrap it up a little bit. So we are on our final question. Our network is ironically called do not smile, because we need to make sustainability a subject that brings happiness into the world. So what object, place or person always makes you smile?
Speaker 4:well, I think well, if I would talk to you every day, I'd say it's you all, because it's been a really fun conversation. But I think for me, whenever we finish a solar installation, and actually when we visit places that are still using their solar system, one month later, two months later, two years later, the gratitude that the people show so I think that's something that's always struck me by being in this energy space is here you are trying to push a product and then your customers are thanking you for selling the product and I'm like you just gave me your money. I should be thanking you. So that's been part of the entire fulfillment that keeps us going is that it's so win-win when you know that you're bringing a value that people really appreciate, even when it's costing them money, but it's saving them money, so it all goes hand in hand. So, yeah, so thank you for your time today.
Speaker 3:Yes, no, that's amazing, Jodie, and we love that. That makes you smile. Usually, people say they're dog and yours is a much more wholesome answer it's been wonderful meeting you. More wholesome answer it's been wonderful meeting you. I should just say as well, for anybody listening, they need to Google Off-Grid Box, because it's a cool box that you deliver as well. So it's a great brand and a great brand story as well. We've not really touched on that at all, but what an inspiring company. But obviously it's inspiring the work you're doing and good luck with that new venture as well. Damla, do you want to wrap us up?
Speaker 2:So thanks to everyone who has listened to our Good Guys podcast, brought to you by the Do Not Smile network of agencies.
Speaker 3:And make sure you listen to future episodes, where we'll be talking to more amazing people about how we can all work together to create a more sustainable future. See you soon, damla. See you, jodie.
Speaker 4:Bye, bye.
Speaker 1:Good Geist, a podcast series on sustainability Hosted by Damla Özler and Steve Connor, brought to you by the DNS Network.
