Meet Young female Entrepreneur who owns and operates a Renewable Energy Company in Somalia

MOGADISHU, Somalia -  Yasmin Osman Muse Samatar is the brain behind Samawat Energy, a female-founded renewable energy company that provides affordable, off-grid, solar home solutions for residents, small businesses, and communities across Somalia.

The 25-year-old Somali-American innovative Entrepreneur founded her company in 2016 in Morocco on the sideline of UN Environment summit, where she began operations before moving to Somalia in 2018.

Now, Samawat Energy has offices opened in Mogadishu, providing solar kits for an affordable price to the residents, schools, Universities, and traders compared to the price they are paying right now, which is believed to be the highest in the world.

As the country is recovering from the civil war, the cost of energy per kilowatt hour in Somalia is five times more expensive than in neighbouring Kenya and ten times higher than in the United States.

Studied in France and UK, she is specialized in political economy, in particular in conflict zones, mainly in the Horn of Africa region. She focused on renewable energy and eradication of poverty.

Throughout her childhood, she traveled to across Sub-Saharan Africa, where she picked interest in introducing off-grid solar systems to the rural areas as residents cannot afford expensive electricity cost.

In an interview with Garowe Online this week, Samatar said Somalia is one of the highest rates of non-electrification in the world, with 85% of the population doesn't have access to electricity, only 15% do.

She added that investors are forgetting people outside the cities and mainly stay away from creating new businesses there as Somalia remained still a conflict-riddled nation.

"Since 1991, we have not a national grid and private sector companies emerged and they started charging the highest price imaginable from diesel power generators, the people cannot afford that, so only the richer is benefiting and people are forgetting about the impoverished," she said.

So that, Samawat Energy aims to act as a solution to this issue by providing solar home kits, with low price, to households, small businesses, and repatriated persons to augment these families’ income.

Samatar disclosed that her company is planning to launch new offices in Garowe in February of this year, from there will go ahead to reach the entire country depending on their success.

She is one of many young people from the diaspora who have taken the entrepreneurship route, to turn problems that the poor encounter in their communities and daily lives into solution-orientated businesses.

Her innovation encourages much young entrepreneurship in the country where over 70% of the population is under the age of 30 who are mostly unemployed due to the lack of effective government that offers job opportunities for the youths.

The potential for renewable energy development in Africa is experiencing an increase in attention lately as investors and world leaders seek a new clean energy frontier.

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GAROWE ONLINE