EXCLUSIVE: Young Nigerians name the industries they want to lead
Durodoluwa Femi-Ajala, co-founder of the Youth Sustainable Development Network, and Chibunna Ogbonna, Founder and CEO of Brave Energies, join Ayomikun Joshua Kukoyi, Co-founder and Head of Programmes at Eco-Learn Nigeria, in telling ENN what they are building and who they want in the room ahead of YES! Nigeria on 19 November.
Forty teachers from Lagos public schools, selected from more than 100 applicants, have been trained to teach climate and sustainability to their own classes, and through them Eco-Learn Nigeria has reached more than 1,200 students with a programme that Ayomikun Joshua Kukoyi first wrote up as a proposal in 2022. Kukoyi, who co-founded Eco-Learn and now heads its programmes, is one of three young Nigerians who answered ENN’s questions in writing for its Young Voices piece ahead of YES! Nigeria, held in Abuja on 19 November alongside Nigeria NOW! Durodoluwa Femi-Ajala, co-founder of the Youth Sustainable Development Network (YSDN), and Chibunna Ogbonna, Founder and CEO of Brave Energies, were given the same three questions, the first of them built on this year’s YES! Nigeria theme, “Empowering Today’s Entrepreneurs, Building Tomorrow’s Industrialists”.
What they are building
Eco-Learn is, in Kukoyi’s words, “a climate and sustainability education organisation focused on making climate education accessible, particularly to people who are often left out of these conversations”. He began in 2022 by exploring how climate education could be brought into public schools, and after bringing in his friend and colleague Omatseye Carpe he approached the Lagos State Ministry of Education, where the two of them “encountered several hurdles”.
The same need came up again in 2023 at a youth consultation that the Netherlands Consulate in Lagos organised in partnership with YSDN. “Together with Damilola Balogun, I had a conversation with Leonie, who was then Deputy Consul. She helped make the connections that allowed an idea from 2022 to finally take shape,” Kukoyi said. Kayode Ogunleye then came in to lead its execution, which Kukoyi credits with “taking it from an initiative into an implemented programme and ultimately helping birth the organisation we now know as Eco-Learn”. The teacher training that followed was run with the Netherlands Consulate and the Public Service Staff Development Centre (PSSDC), with the Ministry of Environment also a partner.
At scale he wants Eco-Learn “to become a standard for climate and sustainability education across Africa, paying particular attention to the educational and opportunity gap between public and private institutions”, and he does not want it to stop at formal education. “Climate change affects everyone, so our vision also extends to people in the formal and informal sectors,” he said. Eco-Learn is also working towards a world-class learning management system dedicated entirely to climate and sustainability education, which he describes as “a platform with the reach and quality of platforms like Coursera, but built specifically around climate and sustainability and designed to reflect diverse perspectives and realities”. In the end he wants Eco-Learn “to help make climate knowledge less of a privilege and more of a tool that people can use to improve their lives, identify opportunities and contribute to a more sustainable economy”.
Seven years after YSDN was set up, Femi-Ajala sees “what my co-founder, our team and I are building today” as going “beyond the organisation itself”. “We are building an institution that develops people, implements impactful projects and creates opportunities for the next generation of entrepreneurs and professionals to participate meaningfully in Africa’s energy sector,” she said. YSDN has gradually become, as she puts it, “an important player in energy sector capacity development and project implementation”, and beyond developing people it is equally interested in “building practical solutions that address real economic and infrastructure challenges”.
One of those solutions is a cooling project in Lagos, which demonstrated, she said, “how solar-powered cold storage can help farmers and agricultural businesses reduce post-harvest losses, preserve the quality of their produce and improve their access to markets”. “The project showed us that access to reliable cooling infrastructure is not simply an energy issue. It is also a question of agricultural productivity, business competitiveness and economic value creation,” she said.
YSDN’s interest in the productive use of energy (PUE) grows out of that lesson, with Femi-Ajala arguing that Africa’s energy transition “must go beyond expanding electricity access to ensuring that energy is used to generate economic value”. Whether energy is running agricultural processing, cold storage, manufacturing or small businesses, she said, reliable and affordable supply “should enable enterprises to increase productivity, reduce operating costs and expand their commercial activities”, which she sees as particularly relevant in Nigeria, “where energy constraints continue to limit the growth potential of many businesses”.
Building on its experience with CoolCycle, and on lessons from its Empowering Lagos SME energy transition programme and the So-Cool project, YSDN is “exploring how to extend access to reliable, affordable and sustainable cooling infrastructure to more farming communities and agricultural businesses across Lagos”. At scale, she said, “our ambition is to contribute to the development of a network of decentralised cooling infrastructure that supports agricultural value chains and enables businesses to operate more efficiently and competitively.” She sees that as more than providing cooling services, describing it as strengthening the infrastructure “that allows farmers to preserve more of what they produce, aggregators to manage larger volumes, processors to access more reliable supplies and agricultural enterprises to reach new markets”. In doing so, she said, YSDN can “help create the conditions for businesses to expand, attract investment, generate employment and participate more effectively in Nigeria’s agricultural economy”.
The YES! Nigeria theme resonates with that work, Femi-Ajala said, because “the journey from entrepreneurship to industrialisation requires more than innovative ideas or access to capital. It requires the right infrastructure, technical capabilities, market opportunities and an enabling environment for enterprises to grow.” Through its projects YSDN is already showing how investment in productive-use energy can answer practical business problems while opening up enterprise development, and its aim is to carry those lessons beyond individual projects into solutions that can be replicated and scaled across different communities and sectors. “Ultimately, building tomorrow’s industrialists means creating the conditions for today’s entrepreneurs to grow beyond small-scale operations into competitive, sustainable businesses,” she said. “For us at YSDN, this is not simply an aspiration aligned with the theme. It is a direction we are already pursuing through the projects we implement, the people we develop and the partnerships we build.”
Brave Energies, which Ogbonna describes as “an integrated energy company on a mission to power an ultra-developed Africa with clean energy”, supplies “high quality and affordable solar modules, inverters and lithium battery storage” through a partnership with Solar Fabrik GmbH in Germany. The company collaborates with “commercial and industrial solar developers, mini-grid developers and electric vehicle (EV) charging station developers as a supply chain and EPC partner to execute their projects”, he said, and it also offers “premium solar power installations for commercial and residential clients” alongside “solar street light installation for communities, estates and private-public-partnership infrastructure projects”. “At scale, Brave Energies will become a pan-African supplier of high quality solar modules and a developer of large scale solar and gas to power projects,” he said.
When it could have gone either way
For Ogbonna, for whom “entrepreneurship is a hero’s journey filled with ups and downs”, the moment came in 2024, when he left his first company because of a failed business relationship. He took a year of introspection, analysing the new opportunities emerging in renewable energy, before deciding to start afresh, and the conviction to back himself came from his “why”, which he defines as “to play a key role in the ultra-development of Africa through enterprise development, job creation, impact investing and philanthropy”.
Femi-Ajala’s moment arrived during the first phase of one of YSDN’s cooling projects in Lagos, after a feasibility study had shown the solution’s potential and given the team the confidence to go ahead. “However, as is often the case with project implementation, what you encounter on the ground can be quite different from what you anticipate during planning,” she said. The first few months of onboarding farmers went largely as expected before uptake began to slow, raising concerns about whether the project would reach the adoption it had projected.
The feasibility study had already shown that the community’s electricity supply was unreliable, one of the reasons the team expected strong demand, and that some farmers preferred to take their produce directly to market. Further engagement showed that while the need for cooling existed, the community had other pressing energy needs that YSDN’s infrastructure could meet. “That was the moment we had to make a decision. We could either remain focused on our original project design or adapt the solution to better reflect the realities on the ground. We chose the latter,” she said.
Expanding beyond cooling as a service, the team added elements of Energy as a Service, including phone charging and access to powered workspace, which answered the community’s broader energy needs and made better use of the infrastructure already in place. “For me, the conviction came from recognising that our responsibility was not simply to deliver what we had designed on paper, but to build something that people would actually use and find valuable,” she said. It was a hard period for the team given the resources and effort already invested, “but we regrouped, adjusted our approach and went back to work”. The experience reinforced what she calls an important lesson about leadership and entrepreneurship. “Having conviction does not always mean sticking to your original plan. Sometimes, it means having the confidence to question your assumptions, adapt to changing realities and remain committed to the problem you set out to solve.”
Getting Eco-Learn into public schools was one of the defining moments for Kukoyi, who said “we had developed the proposal, established partnerships and explored potential funding, but gaining access to the schools remained a challenge”. He could have waited until circumstances were more favourable or kept pushing an approach that was not working. “Instead, we reconsidered how we could deliver the programme. We chose a train-the-teacher model, equipping teachers with the knowledge and resources to deliver climate education directly to their students, and then found the right public agency partnership to support implementation,” he said. That decision let Eco-Learn “work within the realities of the public education system rather than abandon the idea because of them”.
His conviction came from knowing this was a need he had identified and believed in long before the chance to act on it arrived, and hearing the same need raised independently at the youth consultation reinforced his belief that the work was necessary, while the experience changed his understanding of what it means to back yourself. “It is not simply about holding tightly to an idea or believing that your first approach must be right. Sometimes it means knowing what you are unwilling to compromise on, while being flexible about how you get there,” he said. “For me, the goal was never simply to launch a project. It was to make climate education accessible to people who needed it. As long as that remained the goal, we could change the route without changing the destination.”
Who they want in the room
Femi-Ajala wants the next generation of Nigerians actively involved across power, gas, mining and manufacturing, “not just in leadership positions, but in making meaningful contributions to their growth and development”. If she were to be more specific, she said, she would prioritise power and manufacturing because of their direct impact on economic productivity and industrial development. “Energy is fundamental to almost every economic activity, from powering small businesses and agricultural processing to supporting large-scale industrial operations. When businesses have access to reliable and affordable energy, they can produce more, reduce operating costs and become more competitive,” she said. “Manufacturing, on the other hand, allows us to move beyond being predominantly consumers and exporters of raw materials to creating and retaining more value locally.” Together, she argues, the two sectors have enormous potential to stimulate demand, strengthen local supply chains, create employment and build a more productive Nigerian economy, and “the next generation should be at the forefront of unlocking these opportunities”.
In the room she would certainly want “ambitious, like-minded entrepreneurs and experienced industry leaders who can bring the expertise, investment and partnerships needed to turn ideas into commercially viable businesses”. “Ultimately, it is about connecting the next generation of entrepreneurs with the people and resources that can help them build at scale,” she said.
Ogbonna would like to see more financiers from impact investing and development finance organisations willing to partner with youth-led companies, and he sets no limit on where young Nigerians can lead. “For me, there are no limits and Nigerians under 30 can lead any part of the industrial chain with the right mindset, partnerships and favourable policies,” he said.
Kukoyi believes Nigerians under 30 should be leading “the development of local solutions that connect our natural resources, technology and industrial capacity to the everyday needs of our people”, and his own work has let him see that from different angles. Alongside Eco-Learn he has worked on CoolCycle, the same cold storage work YSDN is building on, which he describes as “a circular economy solution that repurposes end-of-life generator parts for solar-powered cold storage to address post-harvest losses”, and through Solar Stewards he has contributed to efforts to connect renewable energy development with tangible benefits for communities. Those experiences have drawn him towards renewable energy, climate technology, circular economy solutions, agricultural processing and local manufacturing, where in his view “solving an existing Nigerian problem can also create a viable business, jobs and new industries”.
The room he has in mind would hold investors willing to back young entrepreneurs, industry leaders with practical experience, policymakers who understand what an enabling environment actually requires, technical experts, educators and skills-development organisations. “But I would also want young people who are already trying to build something in the room,” he said. He believes strongly in creating better pathways for young Nigerians, particularly access to capital, knowledge, networks and opportunities, “but I also do not believe we can always wait for someone to create a pathway for us. There is also a responsibility to apply yourself, develop your skills, take initiative and, where necessary, create your own path.”
Eco-Learn itself came from that experience, Kukoyi said, because “there was no clear pathway from having an idea in 2022 to building the organisation we have today. We knocked on doors, encountered hurdles, found different partners, changed our approach and kept moving.”
“So yes, we need stronger systems that give young Nigerians a fair opportunity to build. But we also need a generation willing to start, to try, to learn and to create where a path does not yet exist,” he said. “I think Nigeria’s next generation of industrialists will come from a combination of both.”
