Q. You and Jesse are both Skoll scholars. How did you end up collaborating? How has your experience with the Skoll community shaped your approach?
A. Jesse and I knew each other well before M-KOPA when we were both working in the Canadian Non-Profit International Development sector that was trying to stimulate the private sector in Africa (the space is not as big as you can imagine). After I got the Skoll Scholarship and was in class at Oxford, Jesse was there visiting, and we just happened to bump into each other in the hallways and decided to catch up. I had a new business plan involving the Internet of Things and water, which I wanted him to invest in. But it turned out that he had a new business which he had just formed, which also involved the Internet of Things and energy financing (now known as M-KOPA). He explained they would launch next year and asked me if I wanted to get involved. I read over the business plan, which was MUCH better than mine. I had just failed a start-up before Oxford and had my first baby born, so I decided to work for M-KOPA for 1-2 years to see how it went and to get settled in Kenya before starting my own thing. That was 11 years ago, and I am still here today, loving every minute.
The Skoll community and my time at Oxford were instrumental in our approach and our company. Of course, the business and social entrepreneurship lessons really helped frame some big problems and give us tools to solve them. But in addition, the network of people we connected to at Skoll and Oxford has turned into our funders, our mentors, our business partners, and our employees. There really is no other social entrepreneurship community out there as big and as helpful.
Q. How do you navigate the tensions between profit and purpose in your work?
A. This is always a tough question and something I have always struggled with, especially when working with non-profits and learning how often their models can be unsustainable.
The first thing I do is remind myself that there is tension and real trade-offs. If maximising profit and purpose really were always symbiotic and easy, it would have already been done. Therefore, I try to understand that getting more profit is sometimes at the expense of some impact, and getting more impact is sometimes at the expense of more profit.
The second thing I do is find areas where I can improve where profit and purpose can work together. In my earlier career, I always tried to maximise everything. I, therefore, would feel very guilty about not always targeting the less privileged and hardest-to-reach customers in the hardest-to-work countries. I have tried serving these customers at scale, and I really struggled to do it and feel it is impossible most of the time. So, picking market segments that are under-served but also large and have similar needs really helps. Building out new products and new operations in countries where it is hard to operate, to begin with, is extremely hard, so you must do as much as you can to make other parts of your business easy.
The third thing is to find partners and investors who understand that trade-offs are needed. They are there to support you during hard times, whether it is more flexibility on supplier payments when there are sudden shocks in the market or longer-term investment horizons; having aligned partners makes things much easier to manage when everything else is not going as planned.
The last thing is not to be too hard on myself. As you have mentioned, there are real tensions between profit and purpose, and you can get caught being overly academic about optimising impact and solving all your customers' problems. But at the end of the day, you are just one person in one company. I have learnt to appreciate it when you visit a customer, and they tell you you've helped their kids study at night with clean air, access the internet for the first time, or watch their first political debate; you have to remember that this is really valuable and if you can continue to do that in a sustainable and profitable way, then you've done your job.
Q. What advice would you give to other young entrepreneurs interested in social impact?
A. I know there are stories of these amazing entrepreneurs who drop out of school without experience and change the world. But from my experience, these stories are very few, and most successful entrepreneurs have some experience in their direct field before starting a business in it. So, my advice to young entrepreneurs would be to get some experience in both business and social impact ahead of starting the business, if possible, especially spending time understanding the customer and their problems.
After my experience working with dozens of non-profit organisations and governments in Africa (mostly ineffectively), I was going to start my own business right away in Africa. But my great mentor at the time asked me about how much business experience I had (which was almost none) and then advised me to spend a few years learning about business by doing strategy consulting and /or doing a start-up somewhere I was more familiar with. I ended up doing both things as well as the MBA, and I cannot state enough how much getting those experiences helped give me the skills, knowledge, experience, and connections in the industry, which have proven to be invaluable.
My other advice is that if entrepreneurship is something you are thinking about and have the stomach for, then you should give it a go because there really is nothing more meaningful that I think you can do with your professional life. Social entrepreneurship combines scale and impact like no other career path. Plus, it feels special and cool to be able to have your kids watch movies at night on an M-KOPA Solar TV, under M-KOPA solar lights, after being picked up from school on an M-KOPA electric motorbike.