Yariv Cohen shares how solar energy is bringing education, safety, and opportunity to millions in Africa.
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Yariv Cohen, CEO of Ignite Power, about the company’s mission to connect 100 million people across Africa to affordable solar power by 2030. With 18 million lives already impacted and partnerships like Mission 300 and the World Bank, Yariv reveals how technology, logistics, and bold vision are reshaping communities through sustainable energy.
About Yariv Cohen
For the past two and a half decades, Yariv Cohen has been part of the sustainable development sphere and has had the privilege of being recognized internationally as a speaker, author, business leader, and strategic innovator, focusing on emerging business models and geo-economies. His career as an impact investor and executive has allowed him to build value-added businesses and disruptive technologies aimed at the developing world.
As an entrepreneur and project developer, Yariv has built a significant portfolio of climate change assets valued at over $1 billion. He has worked alongside a wide array of blue-chip clients, including Google, BP, Shell, Bank of America, Huaneng, and Anglo-American, as well as national governments and multinational organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Commission, the African Development Bank, the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the World Wildlife Fund, the African Wildlife Foundation, and more.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on BR Guest to apply. All right, so did I have Yariv Cohen on the line and he’s CEO over at Ignite. Power. And this episode is part of our Milken Global conference coverage series, where we bring to you the best of attendees, participants, speakers and panelists, and VIPs, all from the Milken Global Conference who attend.
Yariv, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Lovely to, lovely to be on. Alright, so, we got a lot to talk about today, so I definitely want get into the solar revolution in Africa. We’ll talk about what you’re doing over at Ignite Power wb Mission 300, a whole lot more, um, is solar energy at an inflection point.
So we got a lot to cover. before we get into all of that. I want to get into the Milken conference a bit now. I know it. It’s been, you know, a month or two since the conference happened, but to me it’s one of my favorite times of the year. It’s my Super Bowl conferences. was this your first year coming or have you been in the past?
Like what’s your experience in history with the Milken conference? So I think it’s the best conference around there. I’ve been going there for the past decade, I think even 11 or 12 years. We actually, wow. You’re, you’re a veteran then. You’re, , you’re old school for this case then? Yes. And it’s, it only gets better.
It’s more than that. Mm-hmm. The first time we went there, we actually launched Ignite in the conference because we got the right introduction, then we were part of the financial lab, uh, innovation afterwards. Then we made some lectures through the, the IFC program. So we’ve been, our, the, the story of Ignite, the growth of Ignite has been intertwined with, uh, with the conference.
And that’s why we, I attended often. Wow, what a, what a special story. Like literally Ignite was partially made possible due to the conference. I love it. I, I mean, I, every time I do this series, I mean, we’ve been covering it now as a company for, oh, I mean like three or four years now. And I remember I went many years ago.
I went just one time and it, it seems like every single year it. Bigger and bigger every single year. It grows. what keeps you coming back? Like, what do you think a lot, obviously well, as we talked in the warmup call, you’re a Monaco right now. , You’re all, you’re at different conferences.
You do a lot of different things. What keeps you coming back to this one? Well, actually we’re, I’m usually based in Abu Dhabi, And the Milken conference is one of the only ones we actually go to. all across, like there’s the UN general Assembly meet, uh, week Yeah. That I go to. And the other one is the Milken conference because everybody comes there to do, you meet people, they wanna do things together, they wanna work on it.
It’s less of a, conversation, but more, or let’s get things done. And this vibe works well. Well, for me it accelerates. I always meet it with people. Partnerships come out of that, new business, new ideas, new directions. So, that’s why, uh, traveling 16 hours over the North Pole from Abu Dhabi and back, uh, every year.
Amazing. let’s switch it up a bit here. Yariv. I want to get into Ignite Power. First off, maybe start with a little bit more about your company and what you do. So what we do is we connect communities and villages in Africa to power. we give them a solar panel, a battery and lights, and create from a dark, hut to a modern energy home.
We are doing it in scale. We are in 13 countries across Africa. We’ve connected 18 million people. our main partner is the World Bank, and we’ll talk about the Mission 300. My personal goal is to connect a hundred million people to power by 2030. There’s about 600. So if we can deal with the first 100, that’s example for, for the rest to come.
the benefits of having light, don’t have to mention it, but, uh, we also provide them with, phone charging so they can find, charge their phone, have connectivity, and we provide them with internet access, together with the starlink. Hmm. how’d you come up with this idea originally? Like how did you know that like, Africa was the place to be for this and, I mean, where, where’d you get this idea?
It’s so interesting to me. So I used to run, um, a renewable platform company. I listed in on those stock exchange. We had business in Africa and Russia in America. Mm-hmm. In Boise, Idaho. Out of all places. we did small project, big projects, And we had a small business in Africa and I went there and I saw how they live and then I saw that the curve of solar, so basically the cost of solar panels go down.
Yeah. 10% every year. For the last 40 years. The cost of lithium is going down, the cost of LED is going down. And what I saw back then, is that it’s more affordable to provide a solar panel and create micropayments that they pay us $5 a month back then. Then what they’re currently using. So I said, okay, that’s where it goes.
Mm-hmm. And extrapolating where it will go. So we created that. We created a digital platform that can accept those, payments. We have a PayGo, component that stops the system from working if there’s no payments or allows them to remind to be working there. And when we started, we were the most affordable at the time, at $6 per month.
Now with the different partnership we have. We can sell, uh, modern energy to homes for $1 per month, which is universally affordable. Wow. So we can really make a difference. Wow. what an amazing story. how many, lives have you affected, would you say, like roughly? So we have, we installed and, 18 million people.
so far. They have a solar system in their homes, but that’s just the beginning. My goal is to another 80 within the next five years. It took me a day Wow. To decade to reach 18 with everything around. And now I want get to, um, to 100. So we are wanna accelerate, we wanna build a partnership and one of the reasons we come to the conference is I wanna push that forward.
Hmm. you argue that we’re kind of at an inflection point for, solar energy access or would you say otherwise? Absolutely. So if you look at the first wave of solar in Africa, that was big project grid connected. They take decades to produce, uh, to make them work. Now what we have is we have small modular solar that didn’t exist before.
We have price affordability that’s universally affordable. We have the digital abilities both on payment and on workforce management, and we have the willingness of the governments and multilaterals like the World Bank to make that happen. So if you look at the Mission 300, which I will get to in a minute, that’s the World Bank mm-hmm.
Program to connect, uh, 300 million people. To power, that mobilized $90 billion. That’s more money than Africa has has ever had for this. So if you look around, we are talking that within the next five years, Africa will look completely different. If I give example of RDA where we started operating in a decade ago, we are now in every village in the country, 12,000 village.
So if you fly above RDA now, you will see our lights in every single village that without before. And that’s what I for, for the future of the continent. Wow, what an amazing story. Yariv . So what, go further into, mission 300, by the way, the World Bank Mission 300. I want learn more about that.
So the World Bank Mission 300 is a, joint effort by the World Bank, by the African Developer Bank, by the Rockefeller Foundation, and dozens of other organization with a single post purpose. Connecting 300 million people by 2030, to new power. So those are new connections. Those are people that never had power before, that will now kind of join the motor economy.
It has, different components to it. Some of them deal with the digital access, so providing, uh, internet access. And that mobilization, uh, has now created a pool of $90 billion. That’s. Will flow into that. Mm-hmm. And we are doing our part by matching the actual connections on the ground, working closely with it.
And I must say the World Bank and the IFC and African development are working in a sense of urgency and speed that we have not seen before. So you look at all of that critical mass. This is why I believe that Africa would look totally different from solar and from energy access within the next five years.
Hmm. What are some of the, as you scale this up, like what are some of the challenges you deal with? I’m curious about like, some of the hurdles you have to overcome. Of course, capital, one of them and looks like a lot of capital is like flowing into this, but like, just talk to me in general. What are some, what does it even look like?
I’m trying to wrap my head around what it looks like to bring that much power to people. It’s, it’s an amazing feat. so the first part was to get people to want it. It was not clear that they would need solar power. Why? Interesting. That’s done. Governments are on board. The World Bank is on board.
Capital is there for the first time, and now it’s delivery. It’s getting the product shipped on first of all, on a boat. Then they need to reach the country, then we need to send them with a truck to the central. Mm-hmm. Warehouse. Then we need to send it to the districts that usually are pickup vans.
Then motorcycles take them to the village, and then motorcycles take them to, um, motorcycles, take them to the village, and bicycles take them to the home. So first of all, it’s a logistical. Business we have mm-hmm. Close to a hundred thousand, uh, agents working all across the continent. Wow. And that’s a lot of jobs.
A lot of jobs there. Mm-hmm. Yeah. A lot of job. And, and those locations are far, like, if you want to go there, you have to use all those means again, and at the end you will have to walk. So we reach the most, further locations from the capitals are lit, are well lit. If you’re in the capital, you have a light.
If you’re going to the village in the most remote village, those are the places where we operate. So it’s first of all, logistical and then everything else, making a business work in those countries. But the key is logistics, and that’s what we perfected with the use of very good team problem solvers and good technology.
Wow. an amazing story. Um, one that I’m excited and happy to continue to follow too, especially over the next five years to see if this, and I, I feel like when as more and more households come online with power, adds working hours, this add productivity, this ads industry, this ads like.
Like, what are, I don’t even know. I’m trying to wrap my head around what are some of the implications of, as these, as these homes and as these areas have power, like the amount of economy and the things that they can, accomplish, right? Like this is a whole, it’s like unlocking potential and you’re touching all of those points.
Uh, the first and most important is child education. You don’t have power at home, you cannot do homework. That’s the one first. Ah, so that’s even like going back to the original days of like settlers, right? Like when you went from a candle to a light bulb. Now you could, you added working productive hours, like that’s going way back then.
Right? that’s one going Exactly. I don’t have a floor. The house is dark. It’s dark. That’s it. Yeah. The second one is women’s safety. Third is not at home. You can cook outside. Fourth is, most of our clients are farmers. They can stay in the field for another two hours. They don’t have to run back home for, um, wow, for dinner.
They can wake up a little bit earlier, have lunch and do it. They can sort out the vegetable. So we’re having major impact on their economic activity now. They save a bit more. They can buy a milling machine so they can group up together. We sell them solar pumps. We have solar pumps that are in a trolley and a few families together.
They, uh, club themselves 3, 4, 5 families, and now suddenly their yield is double. and the list goes on. And every time we go, we learn on more benefits that happen. English scores of, kids just by power because they play with the phone. And if you don’t charge your phone, then it becomes a scarce resource.
You’re not using it. If it’s charged, you can use it. And even the little games suddenly improve it. So you can see that impact of light and more than light when it comes to bigger machines on every aspect of their lives immediately. Hmm. Amazing. Wow. Well, uh, Yariv , it’s been great having you on the show today and learning more about all the work that you’re doing about the Solar Revolution, which is truly a revolution in Africa, and I’m really excited to follow that.
Um, being said, if somebody’s listening or watching this and they wanna learn more about Ignite Power, how do they do that? first of all, our website, www Ignite Solar. Www Ignite Solar, that’s number one. Anybody that wants to connect, I’m always available on LinkedIn. you can find me there. And we do have a lot of media because of what we’re interested in.
So I write for the New York for the New Times in Rwanda, and different LinkedIn posts. So follow us. We create a lot of interesting content. Wonderful for everybody listening, just so you know. We’ll definitely put some links in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button in Yariv. Thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you. Thank you very much.
