After a Childhood in Darkness, a Quest to Light His Country

Saturday October 17, 2015

By Christina Nunez

Abdishakur Mohamoud didn't get electricity until he was 11 years old. Now he's bringing it to Somalia and other energy-starved nations.

Abdishakur Mohamoud lived in rural Somaliland before moving to the capital, Hargeisa, and co-founding Qorax Energy.

Rural families in Somalia and elsewhere can buy solar lanterns from Qorax on installments, aiding everything from cooking to warding off hyenas.

He grew up with no concept of electricity, walking miles along a dirt path each day to get kerosene for light and cooking. Then, at 11 years old, he got power at home for the first time. His family could afford only a single lamp.

"I thought electricity was like a luxury thing," Abdishakur Mohamoud says. By the time he reached high school in northwest Somalia, he realized that the lack of access to the power grid was "a huge problem," one that affected not just his family, "but all society and the economy as well."

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He set out to solve that problem—one that affects 1.3 billion people around the world, nearly half of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The company he co-founded, Qorax Energy, provides solar lights and home kits to rural customers in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and soon, Ethiopia. The name, pronounced KO-rah, comes from the Somali word for "sun."

Returning, and Rebuilding, After Years of War

Mohamoud spent his toddler years in Ethiopia as a refugee from Somalia's civil war. His family returned to the region that would become Somaliland, the autonomous but internationally unrecognized state founded in 1991. They lived with three other families on his grandfather's farm. The only light came from kerosene lamps. Getting fuel, clean water, medicine, and an education involved walking to a district more than four miles away.

Somalia and the DRC, still reeling from years of civil war, pose a special challenge when it comes to energy access. Would-be power customers have been focused on surviving and rebuilding. Somaliland is relatively stable compared to the rest of Somalia, Mohamoud says, but because of its history of conflict, "people have this wrong perception that they can't really go in and help."

After trying unsuccessfully to consult with power utilities on large-scale solar projects, he and the company’s American co-founders, Christian Nicolas Desrosiers and Nigel Carr, decided to go into the energy market themselves, with help from a Great Energy Challenge grant.

Early on, he says, they realized: "OK. We're bringing products that people need, but can people really afford this?" They introduced a financing system in Somalia that lets customers pay with daily installments on their mobile phones. (In DRC, employees of hospitals and schools pay via a regular salary deduction.)

Mohamoud's family eventually moved from the farm to Somaliland's capital, Hargeisa, where his parents spent three years trying to make a living and renovate their war-ravaged house. The moment they got electricity, he recalls, was exciting.

"I still remember, it was a great thing," he says. "But, actually, it was also the beginning of another problem." The single light—out on the porch—wasn't enough for the family's needs, and it was expensive. His mother allowed Mohamoud, the second of six children, to use it only for studying: "We had all these restrictions."

Mohamoud went to Abaarso Tech University in Hargeisa, where Desrosiers was one of his teachers. "He was an amazing student," Desrosiers says, noting that in addition to his native Somali, Mohamoud can speak Arabic, Chinese, and English—enabling him to talk with both a rural customer at home and a supplier in China.

"He's honestly one of the most impressive people I've ever met," Desrosiers says.

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