Hey Martin! It’s been over 4 years since you founded ecoligo and started your journey to transform the energy landscape in emerging markets. Who came up with the idea? And why?
Back in 2013, ecoligo’s co-founder Markus Schwaninger and I met at a solar energy conference in Nairobi. We were living and working in Kenya and Ghana, respectively, and experiencing the same problem: we could not get suitable finance for solar projects we were trying to realize.
The projects we were working on would supply businesses like universities, hospitals and factories with clean, affordable energy, lowering their energy costs and saving tonnes of CO2 emissions. The situation frustrated us: the projects – if realized – could have had massive environmental and economic impact, by driving the energy transition in the world’s fastest-growing markets and enabling them to grow sustainably.
At the same time, we saw the growth of crowdinvesting in Europe; a flexible finance option that suited the solar projects perfectly. With these projects, we could provide profitable and sustainable investment opportunities that Europeans were lacking.
Since 2017, we’ve put this into action: private investors finance clean energy projects on the crowdinvesting platform www.ecoligo.investments and we implement the projects in countries across the global south.
empowerment & inner transformation... 