Hey everyone and welcome to our throwback episode. In our throwback episodes, we are reintroducing you to some of our most popular episodes.

This is great for new listeners who want to learn more about the work we've done in the past.

And it's a great refresher if you've been a listener for a long time. Enjoy.

Humphrey, thanks for joining us today. Hey, Kwame, thanks for having me on. Really excited to be on here. Yeah, man, I'm excited to have you. I mean, it's been a while since I've actually seen you, so it's good to see your face again. Yeah, definitely. How would you get us started? Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. Sure. My name is Humphrey

Recru. I live in Nairobi, Kenya. I work for a company called Cross Boundary, which is a investment

firm that's really mission-driven and impact focus, and it's focused really on harnessing the power

of capital to make a return and a lasting impact in frontier markets.

And so a lot of that's in Africa, but really globally, honestly. And so what I do at cross-boundaries,

I'm on a team called cross-boundary energy access. So what we focus on is financing mini-grids. So if you're not familiar with what

mini-grids are, they are these. There's essentially standalone electric systems that are able to

bring power to communities that don't have electricity. So I think you have a community, think about

300 houses, off the beaten path. A mini-grid company will come out

there. They will, and to build a mini-grid, they'll bring solar panels. It can be other technology,

but typically solar. So solar panels, some batteries for storage, backup generator to make sure

they have 24-7 power, put poles on the ground, wires,

meters on people's houses, connect them, and all of a sudden they've built a mini version

of the utility grid that you might be used to, and those are their, those 300 houses are their

customers, and then they go a few miles down the road and do it again. And so these things really have the potential to make a huge impact on the continent.

If you look in Africa, about 1.2 billion people, and almost half of them, 600 million people

do not have access to electricity.

And we know that these mini-grids are the least cost way of bringing power to well over

100 million of them, but they're quite difficult to finance.

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