Lagos food processor wins Africa’s clean energy innovation challenge

Blessing Unoka’s Sambal Enterprise runs a solar-powered processing hub with an integrated biodigester, producing five certified food lines with no diesel and no grid connection. It employs 50 women, supplies more than 200 smallholder farmers and took first place at the AfroHackathon in Accra on 25 and 26 August.

Sambal Enterprise processes soybeans, maize, ginger and tomato into fortified food in Lagos on solar power, with a biodigester turning the organic waste into cooking energy and fertiliser. No diesel, no grid connection and no fossil fuels. It has been running that way since 2024 and it won the AfroHackathon in Accra last week.

Blessing Unoka founded the company in 2021. “Growing up in Nigeria, I watched my mother, a food processor, buy from smallholder farmers while good crops rotted and families went hungry,” she said. “That experience shaped my mission.”

Nigerian food processors spend over ₦800 billion a year on diesel and unreliable grid power on Sambal’s figures, while processing waste is dumped or burned. The hub replaces both at once, cutting energy costs by 30% and turning the waste into bio-slurry that goes back onto farmland.

The operation now runs five certified product lines, soya milk powder, bambara nut flour, dried uziza leaves, plantain flour and maize flour, all certified by NAFDAC, SON, FDA and NEPC. It employs 50 women in processing and distribution, supports more than 200 smallholder farmers, and prevents 15 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.

The biodigester was the hard part. Rather than wait for investors, Unoka funded it from the revenue of the solar-powered food business itself and later took support from the UNDP ManuTech Accelerator Award. She is a certified renewable energy expert and nutritionist, a 2025 RMI Global Women in Clean Energy Fellow, a UNDP Top 3 Nigerian Innovator and a GAIN Sustainability Award recipient.

Eleven finalists reached Accra, six of them working on battery second life. The challenge is run by Africa Change Lab and supports the African Green Minerals Strategy, which sets out to make the continent a producer of clean energy technology rather than only a supplier of the minerals inside it.

“Our innovation proves African food processors can be profitable and fossil-free,” Unoka said. Sambal is now looking for partners to scale.

Photo Credit: Africa Change Lab