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Jodie Wu ’09 was questioning her path as an engineer when Jodie Wu ’09 started her freshman year after leaving a corporate internship. Participating in a D-Lab-class project in Tanzania revealed a passion for engineering to help serve emerging markets in Africa.
Wu recalled that he was naive the first time he traveled to Africa: “As a student, you think you can save the world in three weeks.” But during that visit and during his round-trip trips to the MIT Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center, he began to understand the scope of the problems facing local rural communities — which he is still trying to address a decade later.
Now headquartered in Rwanda, COO is OffGridBox, a Boston-based startup. Its entire system uses energy from solar panels to charge batteries and purify water. Its clients include NGOs, businesses, farms, schools, hospitals and clinics and homeowners.
COURTESY PHOTO
After graduating, Wu led Global Cycle Solutions to bring a bike-fed corn vendor to Tanzania’s small farmers after winning the MIT $ 100K Entrepreneurship Competition business plan. “The part that moved me the most in Tanzania was how people could be small but very generous,” he says. “And I stayed with that because I love working in the fields. Some may think, ‘A, bucket showers, car breakdowns – it’s hard work,’ but for me I’ve always taken it as an adventure. ”
When Wu traveled to rural areas, trying to sell corn harvesters and was well versed in Swahili, he learned that solar products were in high demand in these communities. Global Cycle Solutions switched to solar light distribution before selling the business in 2017.
Wu joined the OffGridBox, a solar launch system — located in a 6x6x6-meter spacecraft — that provided a sustainable and affordable solution for remote countries that lacked electrical infrastructure without economics and development. The benefit of the boxes has been particularly clear during the pandemic: the company was given a grant through the USAID Power Africa Opportunities Program to electrify six government health centers that serve thousands of patients a month.
Wu says these centers did not have enough power before, especially to heat vaccine refrigerators, sterilizers and babies. Now they have 24/7 power. “OffGridBox helps nurses and doctors save lives,” he says. “Because it is close to 60% of the health facilities that have no access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa, there is more work to be done.”
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