Profiles of Purpose: Putting Safety on the Front Burner

Stanford Graduate School of Business2017-06-20

Air Pollution#Energy#Africa#Biomass#Grandmother#Poverty#Music#Nigeria#Growing Up

2K views|7 years ago

💫 Short Summary

Femi Oye discusses challenges faced by Nigerian women cooking with traditional methods, leading to indoor air pollution. He shares losing his grandmother to respiratory problems from smoke inhalation, inspiring him to develop clean energy solutions like affordable cook stoves and ethanol gel fuel. Oye's drive to challenge negative beliefs and innovate simple solutions highlights effective ways to address complex societal issues.

✨ Highlights

📊 Transcript

✦

Femi Oye discusses challenges faced by women in Nigeria due to indoor air pollution from traditional cooking methods.

01:07

Oye shares personal experience of losing his grandmother to respiratory problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Clean energy solutions, such as affordable cook stoves and ethanol gel fuel made from biomass, were developed to reduce indoor air pollution and improve health outcomes.

Oye's drive to challenge negative beliefs and innovate simple solutions highlights the potential to effectively address complex societal issues.

00:02We cook for life.

00:04We cook to be alive.

00:06But unfortunately in Africa,

00:11in Nigeria, more than 50% of

00:15the women, they cook to die.

00:20[MUSIC]

00:24My name is Femi Oye I am from Nigeria.

00:27SMEFUNDS, it's an international energy company,

00:32we focus on developing clean energy solutions that supports the BOP market.

00:38We're talking about people living below the poverty line, on less than $2 a day.

00:45[MUSIC]

00:46In Africa, especially in Nigeria, we have challenges

00:51with electricity, just as we also have with cooking fuel.

00:56The smoke that comes from this goes directly into this woman

01:00preparing this meal.

01:02This happens three times a day, every day of the week, every year and for

01:07their lifetime not just that alone during childbirth the woman is putting

01:12her baby at the back and she's still preparing this meal.

01:16So this is not just affecting the woman, it's also affecting the innocent child.

01:22Growing up with my grandmother, Mama Kiki,

01:26I was nine when she was diagnosed to be having respiratory problems.

01:31It was prolonged and she eventually passed as a result of indoor air pollution.

01:38I close my eyes at times and I could see the love, the care,

01:43the energy and the kind of togetherness that we've shared together with

01:48my grandmother and I wish I could do something about it.

01:53We created unique cook stoves, very simple, not so

01:57many moving parts, cheaper than any cook stoves in the market.

02:02Women themselves can put together the components and there is a special fuel,

02:08which is ethanol gel, that we produce from biomass.

02:12Biomass is the plants, the grass, the weeds.

02:16Those are the things that we collect that is energy.

02:19And this fuel, it doesn't have any smoke when it burns.

02:23We can actually convert waste into wealth.

02:28Growing up, I used to have someone that will always

02:33tell me that you can't amount to anything.

02:36You can't really make because you live with your grandmother and

02:40you don't go to good school.

02:41Rather than taking that as a bitter pill, I turned that up into

02:46the motivation to challenge that same idea of you cannot make it.

02:52And that has been part of my DNA.

02:55A destructive thinker, I push the edges, I try the unthinkable,

03:01I experiment, and I can make great things happen.

03:05And that belief encourages me to begin to research and

03:12to look for ways by which we can use the simple

03:18solutions to address this complex

03:23problem that we have in our society.

03:28[MUSIC]

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