Sustainable Future: African Startups - Featuring Yvonne Mose & Jeremiah Mabiria

PITY PARTY OVER

Yvonne Mose and Jeremiah Mabiria are two entrepreneurs passionate about sustainability, working towards environmental solutions, and creating positive change to protect the planet and foster developmental opportunities in Africa.

Yvonne and Jeremiah founded MOMA Renewable Energy (former SBIKE), a company that produces bioethanol cooking fuel from food waste to address energy and environmental issues in Kenya. Their business aims to reach rural Kenyan households and contribute to reforestation efforts.

Yvonne and Jeremiah represent the rising potential of African startups and the need for support in achieving a more sustainable and interconnected world.

Yvonne Mose is a three-month BARKAT Entrepreneur program graduate, an application-based 100% scholarship offering for Middle Eastern and African female entrepreneurs, and part of The Goddess Solution by Puneet Sachdev.

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: You, Jeremiah, you grew up in the US. And you Yvonne, you grew up in Kenya. But Jeremiah, you are also Kenyan descendant, correct?

Jeremiah Mabiria: Yes, we're actually from the same region, from the same community. It's just that I had to ate and relearn the language and do a lot of that when I came home. He just migrated when I was six years old.

Stephen Matini: Jeremiah, how was growing up in the States? You know, having parents from a different country?

Jeremiah Mabiria: It was interesting. It was interesting to be different. I came from a place here where I was like everyone else. We were very young, me and my brother, we were very quick to assimilate and become American. We kind of had to relearn being Kenyan I would say more so than learning to be American. It was natural.

Stephen Matini: When people ask you where do you feel home is, what do you answer?

Jeremiah Mabiria: Minnesota's home, that's where I grew up. But here Kisii (Kenya), is also home. There's a connection that I feel when I'm here. My easy answer would be that I have many homes. I'm lucky enough to have lived in many places and have many help.

Stephen Matini: Yvonne, how was for you instead to grow up in Kenya?

Yvonne Mose: For me growing up in Kenya is I think everything that I know, all that I know about life and it was really good growing around my people, my culture, my parents come from a very low income background.

That's why I got the motivation about who I am and what I want to work on. I think it has really formed the kind of person that I am right now. So yeah, but growing is really interesting. It has 47 tribes I believe. I didn't miss out on anything culturally.

Stephen Matini: How long ago both of you met?

Yvonne Mose: Yeah, about two years.

Stephen Matini: When you met, could you sense cultural differences between the two of you?

Yvonne Mose: For me, yes because Jeremiah talks different. He is very American in his ways, but it was a good surprise

Stephen Matini: Somehow. Both of you have developed over your life an interest, a passion for sustainability. How has that happened? Were there any specific people, any specific event in your past that has somehow made you sensitive to the sustainable agenda?

Yvonne Mose: For me, growing up in a poor background, especially in the rural areas in Kisii, I saw how it was hard for my family and even my neighbors to get access to clean cooking fields.

So for me that kinda shaped who I was because I saw how, how much time it took from me going out to play with my friends or even going to school to study. Growing up, that gave me an idea what I wanted to do. So I was very environmental focused and that's even what I pursued in my university for my degree.

And then getting to meet Jeremiah and through him getting to meet his dad who somehow convinced me that employment is not the way that I will want to go and if I wanted to make more impact I should start something by myself. Like create a startup, create a business that will make more impact in the community. And that's what made me who I am today.

Jeremiah Mabiria: For me, sustainability something that it came maybe from the education system. I remember the campaigns and we had the blue dumpster for the plastics and the green ones. It was taught in school but I think as I got older it became a lifestyle. That's when through the education system learning that the planet's coming to an end and we keep buying iPhones and new cars and we don't think about what the cost of that is.

If there's gonna be change, then I would have to be part of that. I have to be one piece in creating that change. Meeting with like-minded people along the way through groups at school and and college and campus groups. And that's what really sparked my interest.

We have the advantage of not having messed a lot of things up is in the West. It happened a long time ago. Here we have a chance to stop it from happening. We have a chance to create industries while thinking about what these industries do to the environment and mitigating some of the ill effects that they have. So that's what really drove me, especially when I came home to make sure that I was in sustainable energy.

Stephen Matini: Oftentimes the whole notion of sustainability and capitalism and growth, you know financial success, are seen as opposite. What is your view about it?

Yvonne Mose: I think when you think about impact, most people think about charity work and I think that's not what it is.

Google is a tech company that has so much impact on people without being a charity organization per se. So for me, when I think about impact, I think about the basic needs for the communities like housing, clean energy, water, health services.

Those are services that you can start and you can make sure that they are accessible to the low income households or or even to the low income communities. And at the end of the day, for as much as your organization is also get making profit, you are also thinking about the community at large impact and profits go hand in hand.

Stephen Matini: Do you foresee to be easier, you know, moving forward, having this company in Kenya or you think would be harder in the US?

Jeremiah Mabiria: I think it would be easier for sure. What we're doing, we're experimenting a lot, we're trying new things and what I've found is that the Kenyan government, when we have gone to ask for the regulations or to be certified, they kind of let you take the lead. We don't know what you're talking about, we've never seen this. You do it and then we will regulate you.

So it's very accommodating 'cause it's a smaller government and it's a government that is hungry for development, they're hungry for anything that moves a needle forward. So they're very willing to accept.

Whereas in the US it's a very regulation heavy system and so trying things that are outside of the box requires a lot of money because you have to do massive amounts of research, massive amounts of work to make sure you meet the regulations. Here the regulators work with you, they need you. The US the government is so large that I don't think they need any one.

Stephen Matini: Would you mind explaining the idea behind your company, SBIKE?

Yvonne Mose: Since SBIKE was born so that we can have the most social and environmental impact as we can. We currently produce boca biofuel, which is a bioethanol based cooking fuel out of food waste and food processing byproducts.

We make an environmental impact as much as we make a social impact and our product are priced solo, that it is accessible to the rural low income households who are actually our target customers.

So currently the households use charcoal and firewood to cook 'cause those are the fields that are affordable and accessible to them. And if you compare our biofuel to charcoal, which is even more efficient than firewood, one liter of biofuel burns as much as three kgs of charcoal and one liter of biofuel goes for about let's say 90 cents US dollars and one kg of charcoal goes for about a dollar.

Yvonne Mose: That also makes an impact. They get to save as they cook with our fuels. It has health benefits but only byproducts from it are water and CO2. And while we cook with the wood fields, the byproducts are so the smoke and this particulate matter which affects health.

So yes, our organization is mainly focused on the impact that we can make more than let's even profits. But we are also profitable because a little by field we produce it at about 60 cents a liter and we sell it at 90 cents, which makes our profit margin at about 50%. As much as we are making profits, we're also making so much social and environmental impacts.

Stephen Matini: How has been the reception of your consumers, your company?

Jeremiah Mabiria: Our problem currently is production. We have increased capacity twice since the first machine we fabricated and we have never been able to meet demand and this isn't an isolated area of Kisii county that we chose as our pilots area in the sub county.

We haven't even fully launched into the full county or the region, but we cannot meet the demand in just the area that we're in. And we have requests, we've had meetings with the county government where the request is how quickly can we spread it out and which is why we're we're busy fundraising to see if we can build a proper launch facility.

Stephen Matini: If someone is interested in helping you out, what could they do?

Yvonne Mose: Currently I think the thing that we need most is to scale up production. So we will need help in scaling our production, that's expanding our current facility, purchasing new production equipment and also product packaging. And even as we scale up we want to start branding and marketing.

Jeremiah Mabiria: I think it's just the fundraising in order to get the things that Yvan has mentioned, able to get us in more households and serving more people quicker than we would with the slow national growth.

Stephen Matini: For people to use ethanol, do they have to have a specific stove?

Jeremiah Mabiria: There is stoves available but for the rural low income households what we found is there's a company in Kenya that focuses on the urban areas called “cocoa networks” and they have a stove that they sell for about 15 dollars.

But in the rural markets where we serve, most people make a dollar or two a day day on average. $15 is what they need to save up to pay for school for you for one of their children. It is just too much money for them to invest in a stove.

But ethanol is combustible in any container. If you think of serving lines at buffets, they use ethanol to keep the full warm, it's just a container with fire. We have been reusing tins and we've been showing and training our agents to train the customers on how to reuse tins that are used for cooking fat and other things that they already have and to use those as the stove.

So they have a ELY ethanol stove that they get for nothing but the time that they invest in making the stove and they can just replace it whenever it rusts and it costs them nothing extra which allows them to actually buy the ethanol. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to reach them because the stoves that are manufactured are entirely too expensive.

Stephen Matini: Like a typical interview question , ideally if everything went accordingly to your plans, where would you like to be five years from now?

Yvonne Mose: So ideally we would have reached all the rural households in Kenya. That's very ambitious. Currently we're only serving the Western region of Kenya with actually a smaller part, which is the Gossi region.

So ideally in five years we would've reached the whole of Kenya, we would've had more social impact and we would have started already producing biodiesel, which is actually the product that we are currently piloting.

And we would have gotten our production up so that we could supply of bio ethanol so that we could supply industries and also the cook stove companies that make the cook stoves because currently they actually import ethanol into Kenya. There's no company that produces ethanol at a large enough skill that they can support the demand in Kenya.

Stephen Matini: Just to make sure that I understand, you said it biodiesel?

Yvonne Mose: Oh yes, biodiesel. So currently we're piloting biodiesel which is made out of bio ethanol and waste working for, from companies that make foods using cooking oil, that deep fry foods.

Let's say like oil waste from KFC or even from trigger foods or even from tropical heat, the people who make the crisps. So yes, we are currently trying to pilot biodiesel, which is also we've, we have realized it's a niche in the market in Kenya.

Stephen Matini: Do you also have other sustainable projects in your pipeline?

Yvonne Mose: Our efforts to restore the environmental degradation count as a sustainable project. It doesn't bring in any profits but we as a company actually committed to donate 1% of our proceeds to land restoration. So that means reforestation.

So we support community-based organization, women, women organizations, youth organizations and even the local county government in their efforts to replant trees in the county.

We as a country have a 10% aim for mini forest cover marked to reach. So as a country we haven't reached it but the county that we are based in, which is KC County, we are current, we we're currently at 15% forest cover and 26% tree cover. So we are trying to maintain that or even grow that

Stephen Matini: As entrepreneurs, you could have taken so many different routes and I understand how your life experiences, as often happen with a lot of entrepreneurs, have influenced your choices. But the life of an entrepreneur can be difficult. Is there anything that both of you do to pick yourself up when things do not seem to go well?

Jeremiah Mabiria: Not just Yvonne, but having a good team around you, having a good group of people who see things the way you see things and are looking towards the same goals as you do like everyone else, I have low days, I have days where I don't wanna go to the office, I don't wanna find out that the machine is broken .

But once you remind yourself of why you're doing it in the reason, it's easy to get up in the morning because the goal is much bigger than myself and whatever I want to accomplish personally, there's something much bigger that we are trying to attain in conjunction with other companies like ourselves all across, which is show that it is possible to make money while doing good I think is an important thing to highlight in

Stephen Matini: Yvonne. What, what do you do when you feel, ugh, this is so hard to bring your energy up?

Yvonne Mose: I remind myself that there's no one swooping in from out of nowhere to come and save me or to save the situation. So I just have to power through it.

And I think also having a team around me, especially the team that we're building, we don't have offices. Let's say no one is in charge of anything, particularly it's on paper, yes, but we all help each other out.

If I realize Jeremiah has a problem that he needs to solve and he needs somebody else to help him or a different I to look at it, that's what we focus on. That's what we work on.

So yes, having an A team around me that supports me and knowing that through me and through my work I'm supporting other women to come up. That's also what gets me outta bed in the morning.

Stephen Matini: Yvonne, one of the things that it's not easy is to find good people to select good people. How do you do that? How do you make sure that you find the right people for your team? Is anything that you do, anything you look for?

Yvonne Mose: For me, I think it's just gut feeling. Currently the only management team that we have are the co-founders. So we're in the management positions. The rest of our team are our, our production staff and maybe the people in our supply chain.

So when it comes to getting someone to work with us, what we go with is our gut feeling and also is before giving out a contract, we integrate someone into our organization and we work with them let's say on ... actually on a three month probation period. Seeing how it all goes, seeing how they interact with each other and how they work with each other. And then from then that's when we commit and give them our contract. You can't always get it tried all the time.

Stephen Matini: How is it to be the female CEO, in Kenya?

Yvonne Mose: Kenya as a whole is very accepting but Kenya has so many different regions, especially the Gossi region and I think we are also a patriarchal society.

Being a CEO and getting into rooms with people who don't take you at face value or people who don't take you seriously has become kind of a challenge. And I think actually that's what motivates me.

I try to like our production stuff that I've talked about, it's purely women. I try to integrate women into the workspace into my organization, putting them in positions whereby if they go to a room later on when they grow and they want to start their own startups or get into other or employment opportunities, they can actually be listened to and people will take them at face value. So as much as it's challenging, it's also a challenge to me trying to make sure that in future that doesn't happen to other women.

Stephen Matini: And also one of the challenges is the fact that both of you share a personal relationship and a professional relationship and that's not easy. Jeremiah, how do you keep these two important relationships in line?

Jeremiah Mabiria: They're very separate and they have a life of their own. We sat down and we were very intentional about how we created our work personal life balance. She's my boss when we're in the office, I take direction. That's our business relationship and I take that seriously and we have a separate relationship when we're at home and we make sure we give both those things equal time not equal time, but enough time to grow and each of them need to be nurtured in their own way.

Stephen Matini: You know, I get it a good vibe from both of you. Yvonne, you are strong but you are very kind and I love the fact that Jeremiah, you come across as some sort of guardian angel that support her. You know, it's really wonderful. So have a good vibe that this is gonna be wonderful moving forward.

Yvonne Mose: Thank you. That describes us actually.

Stephen Matini: I wanna ask you Yvonne, how did you come across the Barkat program? Because I think it's a wonderful social initiative. The founder Puneet, I also interviewed for the podcast and when he told me about the intention of the program to support female leaders, entrepreneurs, I thought, oh wow, this is incredible, you know, to support women in the Middle East and in Africa. How did you learn about the program?

Yvonne Mose: When we're talking about things that have made me who I am today, Punit and the Barkat program is a major part of it. Jeremiah and I had a discussion and I was working as a project manager and doubling with the organization, but then we realized it was time for me to focus full-time organization.

We as a team sat down and we decided I'll be better placed as the CEO. Jeremiah was going through some things online and then he saw the ban program and we realized that will be the perfect program to introduce me into the market, get me to be the best version of myself.

And we saw Puneet qualifications and credentials and it was so impressive. So yeah, we just came across it on the Internet and we decided to apply and through the program I have become stronger, I have become more confident, I have learned how to channel my energy into my work and in everything that I do and in have everyone that I interact with, especially my coworkers and my support staff and I'm really grateful to have met him.

Stephen Matini: Are you still part of the program or you completed it?

Yvonne Mose: I completed the program about two months ago but I am still part of the network. So once you have graduated from the program, you're not cast out completely. So we have a community, the Barkat community, we still interact with the ladies from my cohort.

So yeah, it's a community that keeps on growing. I was actually very lucky to be part of the first cohort. So the current cohort that's continued is the second cohort. We are community and we help each other out. He has has managed to bring women leaders from every part of Africa and made them into this group that supports each other in their daily lives.

Stephen Matini: What would you say that it could be a first step, based on your experience, for anyone to explore the entrepreneurial route? What could they do?

Yvonne Mose: For me it'll be just start. There's never going to be that perfect moment. There's never going to be enough money for you to do it.

If I was to wait until I was at the perfect position to start my company, I will have waited until I had a hundred million dollars in my account so that I could start off with a big company and make all the impact that I wanna make. So for me my, my advice would be to just start everything else will fall in place.

Do all the research that you need to do, get to know your strengths and your weaknesses and actually get people on your team. For as much as it's I dunno, people view it to be a good thing to be a solo founder, I found value in having co-founders, people who can compliment me because I realized I don't know everything. And I think that's a very important thing to know.

And also when you're talking about the energy people channeling the energy, I feel like most women feel like for them to be hard or for them to be taken seriously, they have to portray masculine energy. But if you channel who you are and you channel your energy into whatever it is that you're doing, it'll definitely be successful.

Stephen Matini: What would you say that are your strengths, which is your biggest strength? Yvonne? Which one is your biggest strength? Jeremiah?

Yvonne Mose: I'm empathetic. I tend to feel the people around me and I tend to try and make people the best versions of themselves.

Jeremiah Mabiria: I'm lucky enough to have, I can see things, I can be able to see the possibilities and not the impossibility.

So when we're talking about opening a factory in a rural village in Kisii, it's very easy for me to see how this is possible and why it would work and why this is a good thing and actually some steps to getting it to happen.

Even some of my co-founders were like, are you sure? Yeah, I would say that. Strength wise it's just being able to bring the team around, communicate to them what is possible.

Yvonne Mose: Today we were driving from Nakuru, we had a meeting in Nakuru so we're driving to Kisii and we saw a factory and Jeremiah told me all the cars in the world and all the money in the world, I don't want that. All I want is that. He sees possibilities where I don't see any. I think that's actually also what attracted me to him. He's someone who sees far and I think that's what I needed in my life.

Stephen Matini: For those listening to our episode, is there anything that would you like for people to take away from our conversation? Something that you deem to be really important for them to keep with themselves?

Yvonne Mose: Africa is coming up in the market and in Africa we have so many startups that are coming up and also youth who are driven to make the world a better place and we shouldn't be overlooked. I think we are coming up and we are going to be hard.

Jeremiah Mabiria: We have moved out of the dark ages that we were in and I see so much hope everywhere I look not just in our organization, but when we go for meetings and programs and you hear the interesting things that people are doing and the unique and innovative projects that they're starting. We just need a little bit of a push, a little bit of a help, big hand from the rest of the world. But I think we are ready. I think we are ready to finally join the rest of the world.

Stephen Matini: Thank you so much for your vision. Thank you so much for your empathy and I truly hope for all that you are seeing to come true because there's a desperate need for more sustainable and more balanced world. So thank you so much for spending time with me. I appreciate it.

Yvonne Mose: Thank you to you Stephen.