Olaedo Osoka is the co-founder of Sunray Carbon. In this interview with Josephine Okojie-Okeiyi, she spoke about how solar-powered farm machinery and cold chains are delivering a real income shift for smallholder farmers.
You spent close to a decade building one of West Africa’s most recognised commercial and industrial solar businesses, expanding it across five countries before its acquisition by Shell. Looking back, what did that journey teach you about what it actually takes to build energy infrastructure in Africa?
Building infrastructure in Africa – whether solar plants or carbon projects – is not an engineering problem. It is a trust problem. You are asking communities, regulators, investors, and local partners to bet on something new, often in markets where the last person to come up with a good idea left a broken promise behind.
What I learned is that the only way through is to be genuinely present in the market, to understand its specific logic, and to design for the conditions that actually exist rather than the conditions your investors wish existed.
You cannot copy and paste a global solution and expect it to land. Whether you are dealing with a manufacturing client in Lagos or a smallholder in the Middle Belt, the principle is the same: design for the conditions, not for the brochure.
