Young African Millionaire
It’s 1:15 pm on a blistering hot Wednesday afternoon in Dar Es Salaam. For a 28 year-old Tanzanian who has built an $8 million (revenues) solar energy company, Ngowi certainly looks the part. Ngowi has a remarkable story. He is the CEO ofHelvetic Solar Contractors – a Tanzanian company that supplies, installs and maintains solar systems throughout the northern circuit of Tanzania. The company sells everything solar from photovoltaic (a.k.a. “solar”) panels and water heaters to battery banks, generators and back-up units.
But what’s even more interesting is the fact that Ngowi has had success at such a young age. Ngowi got his first taste of business at 15 when as a high school student he started selling top-up vouchers. Mobile phone companies like Vodacom, Tigo and other had only just established operations in the country and the only place to find recharge vouchers were in the shopping malls and exclusive phone shops. There were very few distributors or super dealers in Arusha, a mid-sized commercial city that serves as the gateway to the northern circuit where Ngowi lives. Ngowi noticed that most people in his neighborhood who wanted to top-up their phones had to travel significant distances to buy airtime. Spotting opportunity, Ngowi raised Tsh 50,000 (about $50) from his mother and bought top-up vouchers from the big dealers. The mobile phone revolution was in its infant stages, and phones were still relatively expensive. It was during his frequent trips to Hong Kong and China that he discovered solar panels and learned about renewable energy for the first time.
Tanzania has critical energy infrastructural challenges. At the time of Ngowi’s frequent Asian trips, the national power grid coverage in Tanzania was only about 10%. Most companies, government agencies and wealthy families depended heavily on generators.
There was opportunity, and Ngowi wanted to delve right in, but his parents insisted that he completed his education. Ngowi comes from a family of academics. “Right from the time I started the Recharge voucher business, my mother told me that I had to complete my education. At 19, Ngowi had to abandon his business and carry on with his studies. He had already become fascinated with China and solar energy. With some of the money he had accumulated from his business, he enrolled at the Denzhou University in China where he studied renewable energy. While at Denzhou, Ngowi started an informal exporting business. At that time, there weren’t as many people making frequent trips to China as there are today, and as the word spread, many builders and traders in Arusha would send Ngowi money to purchase materials and other goods for them. By the time he had finished with his studies, Ngowi had built up enough capital. We marketed ourselves aggressively- marketing our products to schools, governments, hospitals and just about everyone else- convincing them to use our solar panels,” Ngowi explains.
Solar was a relatively new energy source to the vast majority of Tanzanians and so business was not moving as rapidly as he had hoped.
Ngowi kept marketing his business, sending proposals to everyone he could think of. With time, and as the media championed the cause for alternative energy sources, business began to pick up for Ngowi.
His company, Helvetic Solar was the only company based in Arusha offering solar products. “Whoever needed solar in Arusha had to come to us. Business picked up tremendously for Ngowi from 2007. As his company installed solar panels and related products for smaller clients, the word spread across to contacts everywhere. Soon, government agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations and multinational corporations started asking Helvetic Solar to provide them with solar products.
Ngowi is expanding outside Tanzania. Helvetic now supplies solar to a number of government institutions in Rwanda. So it’s easy for us to get awarded contracts,” Ngowi explains.
While Ngowi has made a small fortune in renewable energy contracting –an estimated $5 million, he is reinvesting his fortune in real estate and tourism. KPMG East Africa named Helvetic Solar Contractors the Fastest Growing and Number One Company in a survey of the Top 100 Mid Sized Companies in Tanzania for the year 2012 – 2013. Ngowi was recently nominated for Africa’s Young Person of the Year award by The Future Awards – a popular annual award that has been referred to as the ‘Nobel prize for young Africans’.
Ngowi laments the difficulty in accessing funding as the biggest challenge in doing business in Tanzania.
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