The 6 Most Inspiring Companies to Work For in East Africa — # 5 Off-Grid Electric

Do you live to work or work to live? We spend most of our wak­ing hours on the clock. So land­ing a job that makes you jump out of bed (rather than bury­ing your head under your pil­low) can make a huge dif­fer­ence in your life.

The trick is to find a role that inspires you — not a soul-crush­ing job that grinds you down. If you’re count­ing the min­utes to 5 p.m. each day, it’s high time to reassess and redis­cov­er your motivation.

Here are six East African com­pa­nies to get you start­ed. These work­places pro­vide an excit­ing mis­sion, enthu­si­as­tic cowork­ers, and a pos­i­tive envi­ron­ment. They prove that it is pos­si­ble after all to tru­ly love what you do.

5. Off.Grid:Electric (Tanzania)

This Arusha-based solar ener­gy com­pa­ny is mak­ing the world a brighter place — quite lit­er­al­ly. Their mis­sion is to make “mod­ern light and elec­tri­cal ser­vices afford­able to everyone”.

The com­pa­ny replaces dan­ger­ous kerosene lamps with pay-as-go solar ener­gy. Their solar solu­tion is cheap­er and more con­ve­nient (you can top up with your phone!) than tra­di­tion­al pow­er sup­plies. They also pro­vide high-tech lithi­um bat­ter­ies, so their clients get the most pow­er for their shillings.

What’s more, they cre­ate thou­sands of jobs and sup­port tens of thou­sands of small busi­ness­es and local entre­pre­neurs by help­ing com­mu­ni­ties go solar.

CEO Xavier Helge­sen told Aki­lah­Net that “the oppor­tu­ni­ty to dra­mat­i­cal­ly improve the lives of over 1.5 bil­lion peo­ple who live with­out afford­able, safe, and clean forms of ener­gy” makes Off-Grid’s work ful­fill­ing. His favorite part about the company’s cul­ture? Every­one prides them­selves on excel­lence, he says. “At Off-Grid, we believe in deliv­er­ing more in every­thing we do. We hold our­selves to a very high stan­dard,” he explains.

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