Monica Maduekwe, ‘Amazon of Renewable Energy in Africa’

For the African continent to develop and match its enormous potentialities, it is imperative that they shore up their energy needs in an efficient manner to meet present and future requirements. Experts opine that part of the strategies will be formulating an energy module that is both affordable and renewable.

Interestingly, a few stakeholders in the energy sector are not just thinking, but working hard in this regard. One of such is Monica Maduekwe, fondly called the ‘Amazon of renewable energy in Africa’.

Educated at the University of Dundee, Maduekwe is a sustainable energy specialist with vast experience in renewable energy, energy efficiency, gender mainstreaming, resource mobilisation and project development; tasks that are buoyed by working as a programme officer at the ECOWAS Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE) for close to 10 years.

At ECREEE, she developed the ECREEE Resource Mobilisation Strategy, with a fund mobilisation target of $654million as well as several technical projects to mobilise funding for ECREEE and the private sector, including female entrepreneurs.

To further entrench her sustainable energy module in Africa, Maduekwe and Franck Adjagba founded PUTTRU, a business facilitation platform that digitally connects African energy companies to financiers from all over the world, thereby easing the challenges of bringing investable businesses and serious financiers together.

PUTTRU recently unveiled a report, ‘Three Must-Haves For Energy Projects To Attract Investment in Africa’, as a means of sensitising stakeholders of the enormous investment opportunities available to projects and innovations in the African energy sector.

The report, which is a crystallisation of one-on-one conversations with stakeholders in the energy industry and the funding institutions, serves as a guidebook for investors and energy project developers on how to design projects that meet funding viability.

Maduekwe stressed that Africa is doing better than the western world in terms of renewable energy utilisation.

According to her, “The western world is gradually shifting to green energy and so is the African continent, according to data made available to the public by the International Energy Agency (IEA), a global authority on the subject of energy.”