Erica Mackey is a self-proclaimed “operations junkie.” She loves to bring structure to situations that others find challenging, which is why she has been so effective as the cofounder and chief operating officer of Off-Grid:Electric(link is external), an off-grid solar startup in Tanzania.
Mackey has been living and working in East Africa for more than 10 years, a place with just enough challenges—not to mention limitless potential—to enable her addiction.
A California native with a bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, Mackey moved to Tanzania after college with a desire to be effective in her new environment. She quickly learned Swahili and immersed herself in Tanzanian culture so she could best address some of the country’s health care gaps. Spending time rolling out mobile clinics and training rural health workers made her curious about what these communities believed were their biggest challenges to development. So she asked them.
Access to electricity topped their list.
This got Mackey thinking: Why is it that over a century after Thomas Edison powered his first light bulb, there are more people off the grid than on the grid? It seemed unfathomable to her that 1.6 billion people across the globe currently live without access to modern electricity. What was worse was that the world’s poorest people pay the most for the dirtiest energy—kerosene.
When Mackey first arrived in Tanzania, it was clear to her that there was an almost insatiable demand for clean, affordable and accessible modern energy. After six years in the field building non-profit operations, Mackey knew she needed to understand how to quickly grow a for-profit company to meet this demand. So she did what any operations junkie would do in this situation: She packed up and went to business school in 2010 for a one-year master’s program in business administration.
A Company Is Born
At Oxford University, Mackey met her business partner, Xavier Helgesen, a talented entrepreneur who was eager to start focusing his attention on energy in Africa. Mackey knew how to make ideas work there. The pair quickly brought in a third partner, Joshua Pierce, who knew something about building energy systems.
This is where Off-Grid:Electric came in. The company solves the same problems for customers that kerosene does, but in a way that gives them 50 times more light for less money and less risk. They also offer customers the ability to charge phones and power radios, TVs and other accessories.
Recognizing the potential of this innovation, Development Innovation Ventures, an innovation fund within USAID’s U.S. Global Development Lab that sources, tests and scales innovative solutions to global development challenges, provided a $100,000 seed grant to Off-Grid:Electric in 2013 to pilot its operations in Arusha, Tanzania.