Coy empowers 1,522 women to build clean energy businesses

A total of 1,522 women from 20 states have been trained in sales and marketing of solar and renewable energy.

The women were trained by Solar Sister Nigeria, a social enterprise that helps women to distribute clean energy products to underserved communities across Africa.

The Country Manager of Solar Sister Nigeria, Mrs. Olasimbo Sojinrin, at a dinner in Abuja said the mission of the company is to provide access to energy where there is none or where five hours of electricity per day is currently not available in the country.

“This is our fifth year in operations in Nigeria, and we are pleased that Solar Sister Entrepreneurs (SSEs) have used solar energy products to make life easy for people in the rural areas while building a viable business for themselves in the process. Many of these entrepreneurs have today built businesses worth over N1 million,” she said.

She added that “Women are our target audience and this is deliberate because women are the managers of energy at home. They are responsible for how the house is lit and how food is cooked and so they are the right drivers of this initiative.”

In spite of the challenges of mobility and logistics that we experience in getting our products to remote locations, our target is to grow the number of entrepreneurs from the current 1,522 to 2,500 by 2020. We also want to extend the business to cover FCT and the 36 states of the federation by then.”

One of the entrepreneurs, Mrs. Esther Peter, from Kaduna State, said that, “I have learnt so much from this company. I joined the business in August 2017 as a Solar Sister Entrepreneur, and I have been able to pay my children school fees, from the profit from my sales.”