Nigerian entrepreneur aims to plug energy project funding gaps
- Posted by Kieth Oliver
- On September 22, 2015
- 0 Comments
One characteristic the Mint economies share is that they have younger populations than their more economically developed counterparts around the world. As well as being an appealing target for foreign companies looking for new consumers for their products, Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey are fertile breeding grounds for talented young people who might have considered — or have — careers in big national or international companies.
However, instead of being tempted by what many consider safer careers, members of these countries’ millennial generation — those born since the early 1980s — seem to be determined to set up their own businesses.
Nigeria-born Rolake Akinkugbe is one example. Given her expertise in Africa’s energy sector, she could have picked jobs in Nairobi, Dakar, Johannesburg or Cairo, or stayed on in London, where she had spent the better part of 17 years studying and working.
Moving back home to Lagos last year, however, was a chance for her to test her feeling that her country is “a land of opportunity”.
Last month, Ms Akinkugbe officially added a “side-gig” to her day job — as head of energy and natural resources at the Lagos-based investment bank FBN Capital — by founding what she says is sub-Saharan Africa’s first “curated off-grid energy investment platform”.
Instead of giving up her work for FBN Capital — sourcing and structuring funding for Nigerian energy companies — she is taking her knowledge of the commercial and strategic aspects of the sector and applying this to fill a gap in the market.
The 35-year-old worked as the head of energy, oil and gas research at the pan-African lender Ecobank before she was hired by FBN to lead the investment banks’ relationships with companies working in energy and natural resources.
Rolake Akinkugbe heads an incubator whose name means ‘light has come’
Having seen the obstacles that established companies and start-ups alike often face when seeking funding to grow, Ms Akinkugbe says her “pan-African incubator” will work to link promising sustainable energy projects with the investments they need to get off the ground. The incubator is called InaTidé, which means “light has come” in the Yoruba language that is widely spoken in south-west Nigeria. It will source financial and technical expertise for small, off-the-grid renewable energy projects across the continent.
Ms Akinkugbe thinks that small projects — often less than 5 megawatts — using renewable solutions such as biomass fuels can have a huge social impact, given the poor access to power supplies across sub-Saharan Africa.
But the priority, she says, is to provide funding to promising entrepreneurs with commercially viable ideas. “A lot of these guys will tell you that’s the main reason their ideas are not able to be implemented.”
She hopes to change that by using her experience in raising finance, and her connections.
Ms Akinkugbe says: “I’m going to be leveraging my network of investors to tap funding for projects [that many] off-grid entrepreneurs are running.”
She thinks her two client bases — energy companies with cash flow at FBN, and small and medium enterprises at the incubator — will complement each other.
Ms Akinkugbe says an entrepreneurial spirit can be found right across the nation. “The time will come [to] make that decision to be a full-on entrepreneur, but I’m not yet at that point.
“I think you could speak to almost any Nigerian today, and they would tell you that they have one side-gig or the other that they’re pursuing.”
She believes this approach is partly because “of the recognition that our society has a lot of problems that require solutions.
“We’re people who like to debate, we’re constantly talking about why things don’t work.”
She adds that at some point, individuals have to consider if there is something they can do to take responsibility to find a solution and “knock heads together” to make things work better.
There are more than enough problems for crude-revenue-dependent Nigeria, hit hard by the oil price crash and investor uncertainty about the economic plans of the new president, Muhammadu Buhari.
Ms Akinkugbe says that the “go-getter attitude” among Nigerians “now mixes with opportunity” in terms of the sheer demographics of her country.
“If you come up with a product today, and you sell it to 1m Nigerians, you’ve made some pretty decent money.”
Investors and the government are interested in building a local entrepreneurial class that, with the right policies and funding, could itself be an engine for growth in the years to come.
Her advice for young entrepreneurs is to develop a personal brand and be consistent and diligent in their area of expertise to gain respect, as she has done in the energy sector.
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