Meet the 48-Year-Old Woman Who Is Building Ghana's Biggest Solar Farm
For more than a decade, one 48-year-old entrepreneur in
Ghana has been quietly building up a multimillion-dollar oil and gas
outfit called UBI Group.
Salma Okonkwo is a rare woman to head up an energy company in Africa.
“I don’t stop when the door is being shut. I find a way to make it
work,” Okonkwo told Forbes. “That’s what propelled my success.”
She’s now expanding her reach across
Ghana’s energy industry, working on an independent side project that may
become the biggest in her career. Okonkwo is building Ghana’s biggest
solar farm, called Blue Power Energy, slated to open in March 2019 with
100 megawatts of energy. It’s set to be one of the largest in Africa.
“Most of the multinational companies that come to Ghana don't put in
infrastructure. They operate a system where they invest very little and
they take it away. They sell their products and leave,” Okonkwo says.
“I’m hoping to provide employment and add to Ghana’s economy.”
Okonkwo grew up in Accra, one of 14 children born to a real estate
agent and developer mother and a cattle dealer father. She often visited
her grandmother in her family’s ancestral village. She's a member of
the Akan clan, whose women often sell products they make, like
sandwiches or smoked fish, to make sure their children are provided
for—and that left an indelible mark on Okonkwo. “The women didn’t know
how to read and write, but they knew how to make a margin,” Okonkwo
says.
After graduating from an all-girls boarding school with little
running water, Okonkwo moved to Los Angeles for college at Loyola
Marymount University. (Her family was able to pay her tuition.) She
graduated in 1994 and briefly worked in California for a food brokerage
company. Then oil and gas company Sahara Energy Group recruited her;
Okonkwo returned to Accra in 2003 for the job.
Within a few years, Okonkwo realized that the firm could grow by
opening up retail gas stations. She presented the idea several times
over the years, but each time she was rebuked. Executives told her they
wouldn’t change their business plan because it would be too political
and would require too much of an investment in infrastructure.
At 36 years old in 2006, Okonkwo decided she’d heard “no” too many
times and quit to try it herself, focusing on bringing liquified
petroleum gas to the hard-to-reach region of northern Ghana, where many
families still rely on burning firewood for energy. Because Okonkwo's
father was from northern Ghana, she knew firsthand how the business
could change lives there. “It was just too hard to pass up the
opportunity,” Okonkwo recalls. “It looked quite lucrative.”
But Okonkwo hit an early snag when she realized that she didn’t take
into account a complicating factor: The North had few storage facilities
for the liquified gas. To get it to the remote region, she’d have to
build the storage herself, and she was already struggling to secure
funding. So Okonkwo pivoted and started trading diesel and petroleum
wholesale. A contract to supply fuel to Dallas-based Kosmos Energy came
in 2007, followed by one with Hess in 2008. In the early days, she
financed the operation by mortgaging some properties that her family and
husband had inherited.
A UBI Group retail gas station in Ghana.UBI Group. |
By 2008, UBI opened its first retail gas station. It soon owned 8
outright and managed another 20 through partnerships. That caught the
eye of Singapore-based multinational firm Puma Energy, which had 2017
sales of $15 billion from operations in 49 countries. Puma acquired a
49% stake in two of UBI Group’s subsidiaries (retail gas stations and
wholesale fuel distribution) in 2013 for about $150 million.
After the partial acquisition in 2013, Okonkwo says, she started
developing her solar company. She estimates the company will spend about
$100 million—financed by roughly $30 million in loans—to create 100
megawatts of solar power by early next year. Construction started
earlier this summer. The plan is to add another 100 megawatts by the end
of 2020.
Despite all the sunshine in Africa, solar power isn’t a prominent
energy source on the continent. Most farms are concentrated in South
Africa and Kenya. In 2009, Morocco announced plans to build one of the
biggest solar farms in the world. The first of the project’s three
phases opened in 2016. “I don't know of another large-scale project like
this in Africa that’s led by a woman,” says Arne Jacobson, who has been
studying renewable energy with a focus on Africa since 1998 and is now
the director of Humboldt State University’s Schatz Energy Research
Center. “Power is fairly expensive in countries like Ghana. If they can
keep costs low, this is will be a profitable venture.”
The project is also personal for Okonkwo. Half of the solar farm will
be located in her father’s village in northern Ghana. The rest will be
spread out throughout the North, which is Ghana’s poorest region,
according to Unicef. The organization says the area has seen the
smallest progress in terms of poverty reduction since the 1990s.
There are so few employment opportunities in the north of Ghana
besides farming that most women migrate to Accra looking for work. Many
can only find jobs as “kayayo”—working in markets carrying goods for customers, sometimes known as “living shopping baskets.”
They live in slums and regularly endure harassment, theft and even
rape. Okonkwo, aiming to create a better alternative for some of these
women, says Blue Power Energy has already created hundreds of jobs in
northern Ghana and that more than 650 will be created upon completion.
Okonkwo’s ultimate goal is to bring cheap energy to northern Ghana
through the solar farm, which she hopes will incentivize companies to
create lasting jobs there. In the meantime, she is opening a day-care
center in Accra for children born to kayayo women, where, as she
explains, they can “get educated and hopefully break the cycle.”
“I want to bring support to my people in the north,” Okonkwo says. “Then there will be more Salma’s all over the place.”
Credit: Forbes.com
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