Key Takeaways on Reimagining Nigeria's Energy Future: Innovation and Policy| Tobi Karim

So we've both listened to or we listened to the episode now with Habiba.

And my first key takeaway was her point on access is not enough.

That's not what is going to make the country more productive.

You have to figure out how to link it to income, not just like supplying the energy.

And I'll use the example of what happened recently, right, where in Nigeria we had this introduction of like Band A, Band B or like a enforcement of it more.

And one of the stories that ended up coming out of it was a lot of people who could afford to pay for energy instead turning their power off and switching to like inverter because like they're not doing anything that is economically productive apart from sitting in your house and enjoying your A.C., and being comfortable, right? And the same thing has happened here with the case that RMI had fixed in all of these mini grids in these rural areas and all of a sudden people had 24-hour life, but that didn't translate to economic productivity.

And so what they ended up having to do is she gave the examples of working with farmers who needed to process some of their oil palms and providing energy and working with different partners to be able to provide the grinders, the processors, the storage as well, and that becoming extra income for the farmer.

So the money that they would have just made from only farming the oil palms and giving it to someone, they then got extra money from that.

And then they were also able to power all of these other businesses that were able to provide the equipment slash extra infrastructure for them to process this.

So it was that full circle thing of Here's an example of when you provide energy, it's not just about giving everyone lights or even just at the home level.

It's almost like, how do you think about this in the more industrial level? And this is even just like small scale business example

for them.

But yeah, it really made me think of that.

I think this is something for, of course, like investors to also be thinking about when people try to like pitch or frame this idea of what it means to just power places like Nigeria.

I do.

I think that's something I personally believe in.

And it's something we really focus on at work because household electrification is important.

But if you don't have, you can, you know, you can expand the supply as wide as you like.

But if you don't have the demand to actually anchor it, your supply won't be sustainable.

Right.

Because until you do that, the project developers won't, their businesses won't ever be profitable if we're just focusing on kind of building out all these huge systems to communities that might not necessarily afford it or won't have that kind of anchor demand to make the supply viable.

And I think one thing that...

I like to always think about is if we don't do that and focus really around kind of productive uses of energy, I think people then get lower tier systems.

Because there's two options by this I'm sorry, but is it a very cheap cop-out that the Nigerian government seems to constantly do with so many things when it comes to development? Or if I can just provide this thing at the cheapest level as opposed to at the best and thinking about how to coordinate the economy to then...

make this a productive output it just leaves us in a place