This 33-year-old raised $40 million to give rural farmers solar power and help fight climate change (via CNBCMakeIt)
Samir Ibrahim didn't have a singular "aha" moment that led him to his multimillion-dollar business and a crusade to fight climate change 8,000 miles from his home in Orlando., a start-up headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya that helps farmers grow food without relying on rainfall by using solar-powered irrigation systems instead.
He continues: "We also realized that if smaller farms weren't growing enough crops, we wouldn't have enough food to feed the world in the next few decades – so we started to think about how to solve that problem."They decided to craft their business plan around sub-Saharan Africa, which has a large portion of the world's unused farmable land, and where about 60% of the population are smallholder farmers, according to.
To start, the pair used about $5,000 of their personal money to research and develop their solar irrigation system, then borrowed an additional $200,000 from friends and family to build more prototypes – a loan that they stretched to sustain SunCulture for about two and a half years. Diesel and petrol pumps are the "go-to sources" to power small, older farms in Africa, Ibrahim says. Such pumps emit carbon dioxide, and the fuel costs for one pump, which needs to be replaced every month, ranges from $40-$80 per acre . SunCulture's irrigation system, however, is designed to last at least three years, and costs $1,200. Farmers can choose to pay $40 per month for 30 months until the pump is paid off.
"There's certainly a heightened demand and appetite for investments in businesses fighting climate change right now," Ibrahim says. "I think people seeing the increased number of wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters happening has just made the problem more alarming to people … it's starting to hit closer to home."
Then there's the logistical difficulties of working in Kenya: When it rains, roads become badly flooded, and when there's power blackouts, SunCulture's technology infrastructure shuts down. "There are a lot of challenges with this work, but it's important," Ibrahim says.
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