NURU: A Solar Energy Company's Story
By Graham S.
Solar panels by Getty Images Signature (yangphoto) Created in Canva
Have you ever wondered what a good job to pursue after you finish school would be? Jonathan Shaw, father of a student at NorthStar Academy, is the CEO of a company known as Nuru (Swahili for light) that helps many people by providing renewable energy to them. Nuru is a solar energy company located in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a central African country which is suffering from violence, corruption in the government, poverty, and a lack of education. However, Nuru has been making huge strides in fixing these problems. Below is an interview with Jonathan Shaw, the aforementioned CEO and founder of Nuru:
Graham (Interviewer): What inspired you to start Nuru?
Jonathan Shaw (CEO of Nuru): What invited me to start Nuru is the fact that I lived in a neighborhood where no one had electricity, including my family. It became clear that trying to do anything we wanted to do educationally and healthcare and business development, etc. wasn’t possible without access to power. I didn’t know this at the time, but over 90% of the people in Congo were dealing with the same issues that we were dealing with. So rather than just get a solar panel system for our own home, I decided I would try to bring power to my community. I had no idea, with that decision, we would change our families lives forever and take me down a path I never imagined I would ever ever be on.
G: What were some of the challenges you faced when trying to start Nuru?
J: There were so many challenges, most of them to do with my lack of experience. I knew that to build these systems cost huge amounts of money. I didn’t have any money personally and came from a family with modest means, so I had no idea how to do that. So I think one thing that’s good about me is I’m not afraid to just try things even if I don’t know how to do them. So I went out to try to find investors who might consider this type of project and just started chatting. By tremendous fortune, I found a partner who saw potential in me as an entrepreneur. They decided that they would help the company grow and help me learn how to lead a company like this, and raise the amount of money we needed to make.
G: What difficulties are caused by trying to start a legitimate company in the Democratic Republic of Congo?
J: According to the world bank, Congo is in the bottom 10 in the world in terms of ease of doing business. It’s incredibly difficult with security issues, government corruption, lack of banking institutions to provide capital and access to critical technologies. We’re living in a context with a very poor level of education, and therefore, often our staff are brilliant people, but with very weak educational backgrounds. So it’s hard to think of an aspect of business that isn’t extremely hard in the DRC. The upside is, there’s just absolutely incredible potential, partly because it’s so hard to do business, few people have tried. That means even if someone without experience, like me, has an idea that could work, there’s a huge open space for these ideas to be attempted.
G: Are there any moments in your career that you would consider to be formative or powerful?
J: In the end, even though we’re raising tens of millions of dollars and working with advanced technology, the most meaningful and important part of the business is our clients. Two of the most powerful moments for me were when we provided street lighting to a community that had never had it before, and there was a spontaneous party. Some old women in that community were just dancing with joy with members of our team, and seeing how immediately transformational this work was reminded me of why we do what we do and put up with all of the challenges that we face: so people like those women are able to have a transformational experience in their own lives. The second example is seeing the overall neighborhood that we serve in the city of Goma, one of the poorest neighborhoods in a very poor city, in a very poor country, the economic impact of providing electricity is stunning. You can just see how hundreds of people have been able to build sustainable livelihood for their families and send their kids to school and begin to save money and accumulate capital just because they have reliable energy that they can build livelihood on. To me, those are the reasons I do the job, and without the clients we serve, there’s no reason for me to do this work.
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Graham S. lives in Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has been studying at NorthStar for two years and is in tenth grade. He enjoys reading, writing, video games, Dungeons and Dragons, and Warhammer 40k. He hopes to one day be an author but currently is enjoying being a journalist for the Navigator.