Business
Profile: Anthony Kiptoo Ng’eno, Kenyan entrepreneur harnessing wind and sunlight to generate profit
Anthony Kiptoo Ng’eno
Many things may be lacking in Africa but there are two which are abundant and free all over the continent – wind and sunlight – and Kenya’s Anthony Kiptoo Ng’eno decided to turn them into a profit.
In 2001 he and his partner Michael G Chavanga formed a company, Winafrique Technologies Ltd., with the goal of taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the renewable energy market in East and Central Africa.
“When we started off the company, we were given a very difficult challenge of powering a very remote site, and we quickly realized that conventional power could not reach where this project was going to happen and diesel engines were also going to be very expensive, so we started looking at renewable energy,” Mr Ng’eno told the BBC’s series African Dream.
“We quickly got training from China, Hong Kong and the US on how to design, supply and maintain, and we met quite a few people – consultants, engineers – who also helped us build the company along the way,” he said.
