When Jonas Barman, a 40-year-old Swedish engineer, first came to Kenya, the idea of starting a solar energy company was far from his mind. In fact, he was looking for a school roof on which to test an idea.
A master’s student at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the time, he had chosen Kenya as the setting for his thesis on the reliability and affordability of photovoltaic (PV) solar systems in areas with weak or non-existent grid power.
