Voice of Energy Leaders: Muhammad Jibril Omar

We sat down with Muhammad Jibril Omar, CEO of OFGEN Africa, a Nairobi-based leader in distributed renewable energy solutions. Since 2013, OFGEN has grown into a regional powerhouse, developing 34 MWp of solar capacity, managing 16.3 MWh in battery storage, and operating across Eastern, Western, and Southern Africa.

Jibril shares what it means to lead Africa’s transition to decentralized clean energy—from powering Serena Hotels to industrial solar installations in South Sudan, spreading its tentacles across Africa—and what’s next for OFGEN’s pipeline in the years ahead.

Briefly introduce your company (origin, footprint, focus).

Jibril Omar: OFGEN Africa is a distributed renewable energy company. Based had office out of Nairobi. It was fast registered in Kenya in 2013. And we have offices in Uganda and Johannesburg in South Africa. In terms of project implementation, we have implemented projects across Sub-Saharan Africa, from Mauritius to Malawi to Cape Town to Nairobi, Uganda, the DRC, and many other sub-Saharan countries. Our focus is on the commercial industrial sector, Solar Power, and Battery storage, for commercial and industrial customers. I am one of the founders and the CEO of the company.

Share your company’s biggest achievement in the past 12 months.

Jibril Omar: The biggest achievement in the last 12 months has been the breakthrough in the telecom sector. I mean, we've always been focusing on commercial industrial customers, but for the last 12 months, we've developed a solution for telecom companies. Telecoms are one of our biggest power consumers, and they fall under the commercial industrial skill, and in the last 12 months, we managed to contract with a telecom, Fast Telecom client. So we're looking to do over 3000 sites in Kenya for the Telecom. I think that is our biggest achievement this year.

Key milestones you aim to achieve in the next 24 months.

Jibril Omar: I'll say that in the next 24 months, our target is to (1) develop further our solutions and (2) provide them at a very competitive rate, mostly through access to affordable financing. I think this is something that I personally, as the CEO, I'm looking into; achieving the most over and about, the regular targets of how many customers we are targeting this year, what technologies we are looking to apply, but the biggest rule of how much are we going to do this would be based on or affected by our financing is.

For the next few years, I'm making financing a major priority: getting affordable financing for African countries, and if possible, in local currency. As you know, financing in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, or Nigeria is not as competitive as that of a European country. Our financing is three times what they get in Europe, sometimes ten times. So that is my agenda: to get competitive financing.

Major industry challenges from your perspective.

Jibril Omar: I think the biggest challenge facing us now is that the regulatory framework is not very clear or harmonized. Over and above the biggest challenges are, of course, (1) financing, (2) the regulatory framework, and (3) the lack of bankability of the clients in Africa. So those three are the major challenges we're facing at the moment..

Thoughts on governance improvements to accelerate energy access.

Jibril Omar: I think one is getting all stakeholders engaged and changing policies. There is a gap between what is being preached by the the leaderships and what is on the table in terms of policies and the rule of law, for instance there is heavy taxes, but at the same time, you cannot encourage the country to go green and tell people to invest renewable energy when the equipment are being taxed. So they need to harmonize between policies and regulations, for all countries as well, so that we're able to improve the renewable energy access coming into Africa.

A little about your personal background and journey into the sector.

Jibril Omar: 2 years ago, I was working in a marketing company in out of Rwanda, and I was based in Kigali. Then, we started doing a lot of study on waste energy, and then I got more interested in renewable energy, waste energy, biogas, and so forth. And then I moved to Kenya, and I met my current partners who have backgrounds in engineering, and we discussed a lot, and we said, “Okay, you know, how does this look? And said, okay, they said, if you're keen in doing this business, you, it might take you another three, four years before anybody knows what you're doing” and that was so true, because in 2012, if you were talking about solar, nobody knew what you're talking about in this part of the country. So we had to spend a lot of time talking to people and educating everyone, but at the same time, the equipment and everything were very costly and expensive. We were not able to land this financing tool, or we were not able to afford not even for our customers. That has been my journey on that, and I think from that, I've just been running this business, eating and sleeping, talking renewable energy.

What do you enjoy most and find most challenging about your role?

Jibril Omar: To be honest, I don't see much of a big role that is challenging. I would say maybe I know what I enjoy most. I know I enjoy preaching about renewable energy throughout, meeting different clients with different needs and requirements, and having to create and provide a solution that is quite different from one to the other.