By Tom Jackson | From Disrupt Africa

Running businesses specialising in the provision of affordable solar power to off-grid communities in Africa offers huge opportunities to entrepreneurs.

This is according to Uvie Ugono, chief executive officer (CEO) of Solynta Energy, which installs solar systems for homes and businesses in Nigeria and Ghana and is planning to expand to South Africa this year, and Sachi DeCou, co-founder of Juabar, which designs and builds solar charging kiosks before leasing them to Tanzanian entrepreneurs.

Disrupt Africa has reported before on the high levels of investment coming into African solar startups, and the figures back up the scale of the problem they are looking to tackle, and thus the size of the opportunity.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), 585 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity, with the continent home to 48 per cent of the global population that has no access to electricity. The region on average has a grid access rate of 20 per cent. Yet in sustainable, easy-to-maintain and increasingly cheap solar, many feel they have found the answer to the problem.

Ugono, in fact, says the potential of solar in Africa as a source of power is “absolutely enormous”.

“Africa receives approximately 49 per cent of the total solar energy on earth, and also has the lowest energy capacity per capita in the world,” he said.

Read more at Disrupt Africa