Al Amin Idris is the CEO and founder of Interface Africa. In this interview, the 28-year-old renewable energy enthusiast highlights his company’s foray into providing data for government and development agencies that are setting policy direction.
Tell us about yourself…
My name is Al Amin Idris. I am the founder and CEO of Interface Africa. I have been doing this for about five years; we help companies, like solar companies, to access underserved markets in communities that are very hard to reach within Africa, starting with Nigeria.
What inspired you to this field?
I grew up in a community that is undeserved in Nigeria; I have witnessed, first-hand, that energy poverty and lack of access to essential services can hinder people and their productivity, so I felt it was a golden opportunity to address this societal problem because it is one of the most important problems we have as a society. This situation affects our productivity which then affects the income of our people.
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It also exposes them to other vices or opportunities they should not be exploring, like migrating to other countries through illegal routes. So, the whole goal is to increase the productivity of people and give them access to energy, reliable and clean energy, as well as increase their incomes.
Did this influence you to study a course related to solving these issues or did the inspiration come after your undergraduate studies?
I studied computing while in school but I got exposed to entrepreneurship of solving problems through challenges we were exposed to. I studied at the University of Bolton in the United Arab Emirates. While we were there, things happened in society and we were tasked to solve them. For instance, when I was in my second year, a child was left on a school bus, they couldn’t find him as everyone got off the bus and no one knew he was left behind, the blistering weather of the country later led to his death from heatwaves.
So, we looked at this problem as technologists and we decided to create a bracelet that could be worn on children for their parents to know where they are at any particular period.
We submitted the idea in a national competition and we came second. That was what encouraged me to look at how we view societal issues with technologies to solve them, moving forward.
What was the challenge in setting up your company when you returned to Nigeria?
When I was done in school, I did an internship with an aviation company in Dubai, they wanted to hold me back but I worked with them for a few months.
There is a problem in Nigeria that needs to be solved which is lack of data in the agricultural sector; this encompasses getting access to farmers, and getting their inputs and products across to others in the sector. I can say that I was already playing around with that and found the problem very exciting. It was the desire to solve that that brought me back home.
I came back home and worked with like minds; we ended up powering a lot of the transactions in the Anchor Borrower Programme, especially the 2.0 version, in Kebbi and the North-West axis, generally. We did a lot of mapping, field monitoring, satellite imagery for monitoring of field activities. As we grow, I look at what I can use data and technologies to solve.
The programme enabled us to see patterns of numbers of farmers that have reported having clashes with herders, like their crops, pattern of cultivation, and routes herders pass on their farm fields. So, with this, we can help policymakers arrive at a decision that a particular crop in a zone is more subjected to clashes with herders in a particular locality.
So, it started with just mapping of farm fields and then presenting the data to the government. Beyond that, we get to see a lot more value be it in economy and security.
How were you able to sustain the programme with the end of the scheme?
Fortunately for us, things changed, that was an opportunity we had for that moment. But we had other opportunities; we did a lot in the market moni, Trader moni and farmer moni beneficiaries’ identification. So, it was product after product where we saw the need for data.
Other projects have come to us in which we serve as technical partners or lead consultants. However, we realise that for every programme, we keep on reinventing our approach. Some clients already have their processes, terms of reference and all that, so we have to go back to the drawing board again to start designing the project around their blueprint.
That was what gave birth to Interface. Interface is just an attempt to have a platform for all that we have been doing as services over these past years. What we are currently doing with it is that for every data we have collected, we are creating a drop and pay platform that anyone can come into and use. Be it in government for target beneficiaries or intervention programmes or development partners that want to do their human capital development programme.
It might be that they are interested in data on women-owned businesses or women farmers in rural communities within a certain age group or education level, so, they now have a strong pay platform that they can use as an interface to derive that.
It has been working so well and we have been working with different industries. We are currently embarking on a census, mapping every single micro or small business in Nigeria. That is our next project.
So, after we have done the mapping of the businesses, agencies of government or private businesses can now build on the data to identify businesses that are not banked.