Jean Bosco, a young Rwandan who grew up in a village where there was no fuel or wood for a fire is changing the narrative of renewable energy in his community and Rwanda as a whole. He is the Founder/CEO of the problem-solving, stride-attaining Habona Ltd. My mother, a great teacher of mine, told me that to dream, I needed to go outside and look at my community and see how everything is going,” he told the Skoll World Forum in 2016. “I was so sad because during those few days I took to look around; I found that I was uncomfortable with the way I was living and the way my community was living.”
“For the future, I want to see how we can scale down our processes in order to make our model franchisable, and then apply it to villages not just in Rwanda but outside the country, too.”
Jean Bosco holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Rwanda and is completing his final papers of CPA. At 19, he hit upon the idea of turning organic waste materials into clean-burning briquettes, thus making an affordable and sustainable replacement for charcoal. With a startup loan from the African Entrepreneur Collective, and convincing his district to let him use a waste management facility for free, he has since created a business called Habona (which means “illumination”).
Habona Ltd is a company registered in the Republic of Rwanda that is dedicated to providing various products of cost-effective, renewable energy sources that are extremely beneficial in the face of Rwanda’s severe energy crisis. The company’s offerings include biogas for household cooking and lighting, biomass briquettes, and bio-fertilizer for farmers. Habona also provides consultancy and maintenance services regarding integrated waste management and energy solutions, and continued research and development of environmentally friendly solutions.
The targeted project deliverables include at least 50 tons of briquettes every month, and 100 tons of fertilizer in every quarter.
To kick off the project, Nzeyimana mobilised a small team and they set up waste collection points in Nyamagabe town where they would gather waste from people’s homes and hire a vehicle to carry them to the plant.
Upon founding HABONA, he was crowned as the 2014 Top Young Entrepreneur of Rwanda and he received the 2015 young achiever award by the First Lady of Rwanda. He has also won a number of other prizes, including the African Innovation and the India-Africa Young Visionary prizes. He was selected as the 2015 Mandela Washington Fellow through the flagship program of the President Obama for Young African Leaders. Public speaking appearances include at the 2014 Pan-African Youth Conference and the 2014 Rwanda Day Celebration in Atlanta. He has also been invited by HRH Prince Andrew to pitch his business in Buckingham Palace, UK. Jean Bosco also shared a stage at the 2016 Global Innovation Summit in California with Obama and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
The future for Jean Bosco is quite clear. In his words,
“For the future, I want to see how we can scale down our processes in order to make our model franchisable, and then apply it to villages not just in Rwanda but outside the country, too.”
