Profile: Innovation leader with answers

Join CrossBoundary’s Tombo Banda on the search for renewable energy solutions

“ENERGY, to me, is the enabler of everything,” says Tombo Banda, the 38-year-old Malawian mechanical engineer and sustainability innovator. “You need energy for education, you need energy for health, you need energy for business. Without energy, you’re not going to do any of those things.”

Banda’s mantra could be a family motto. Her father trained as a mechanical engineer and ran their local water board in Blantyre before setting up his own business. When he saw that his daughter was good at maths and physics, he suggested she try mechanical engineering too. “It’s all about solving problems,” he told her. From a young age, he was taking his children around water and treatment plants on weekends. “We were always travelling about the place looking at random engineering things.”

Her father had a succession plan in place. But after studying engineering at Imperial College in London, Banda returned home and joined her father’s firm, working mostly on building services. Within a few years, though, she started getting itchy feet. Malawi didn’t seem big enough for what she wanted to do. When a colleague recommended a masters course at Cambridge University in engineering for sustainable development, she jumped at the chance.

“I don’t think everyone should aspire to American models of consumption,” she said. “What does it mean to be in a developed country? For me, that means you have access to your basic needs: you have energy, you have education, you have health, you have basic infrastructure. You can get from A to B. You can live with dignity…How can you expect communities to thrive without the most basic things they need?”

Based in Nairobi, Tombo Banda is now a managing director at CrossBoundary, a mission-driven investment and advisory firm. She leads its Mini-Grid Innovation Lab, Africa’s first R&D fund exclusively focused on testing new business models for mini-grids. It’s designed to close the gap for the 600m+ Africans who do not have reliable power.

Electrifying Africa has always been an expensive proposition. The answer is technology – and think outside the box. Mini-grids based on solar power are a big part of the answer. Appliance financing, allowing consumers to buy income-generating machinery on credit is too. As are smart inverters to change electric current from DC to AC (the kind most appliances use); they also allow developers to make modular increases to the mini-grid.

With much of the technology already developed, Banda believes the emphasis should be on reducing the cost of rolling out technology – and advising governments and public utilities on subsidies for electrification. She reckons CrossBoundary’s innovation lab might close by 2025. “It’s not rocket science,” she says. “It just needs rolling out.”

For her own part, Banda has her eye on e-mobility. “This is a gamechanger on the continent,” she says. “Most of our population is under 16. If we get it right, they’ll think of internal combustion engines as being like landlines. ‘What is this noisy, polluting thing?’” Getting electric vehicles connected to mini-grids will boost income generation. “We need to figure out what we need to put in place to catalyse that and make it a quick transition. That’s my kind of problem.”