Magiro Hydro Electricity Limited (MHEL) is a private enterprise established in 2014 under the sole proprietorship of Mr. John Magiro and fully registered in 2016 as a limited company. The business began as a mini-hydroelectric plant with capital of Kes 6,000 obtained from a small-scale rabbit and goat farming project ran by Mr. Magiro. The hydropower plant based in Mihuti Village, Murang’a County was assembled from locally available standard engines and recycled bicycle parts to generate electricity from a waterfall on river Gondo.John started MHEL to address the challenge of no access to electricity by rural households in Murang’a County. The unsophisticated production of energy by the MHEL project has enabled the rural population in Murang’a to access affordable and reliable electricity. These households are characterized by low-income levels coupled with no electricity connection. As a result, they relied heavily on kerosene and other biomass fuels for lighting and cooking, thus at risk of respiratory health complication due to indoor air pollution.
In 2014, John Magiro competed in the NETFUND Green Innovations Award (GIA Phase II) Programme where he emerged as the overall winner within the individual category. To enhance the capacity of the business, NETFUND provided technical support and awarded a seed grant to the innovator under the NETFUND Incubation Programme.
This incubation support enabled the business to increase its power generation capacity to 47kW down from 7kW translating to over 600% increase in productivity. In addition, the project expanded its customer connectivity to 250 from an initial of 30 households in Murang’a County.NETFUND GIA Programme, identifies, promotes and supports green innovations. And one way of promoting these green businesses is through financial and technical assistance linkages for selected innovative technologies. In 2018, with support of NETFUND, HydroBox Kenya Ltd (a subsidiary of HydroBox NV1), acquired an equity investment in MHEL. Through this partnership, HydroBox Kenya Ltd injected Kes 29,340,000 into MHEL, an equity investment with the intention to scale up production to 688 kW and connect over 2,000 households.To date, MHEL has successfully acquired two additional hydropower plants of combined generation capacity of 100kW. Also, the grid infrastructure has been upgraded to required standards and providing affordable electricity to over 750 households. MHEL has created youth employment opportunities to 26 employees, that is 6 contractual employees and 20 casual workers at the community level.For sustainability of the business, MHEL and Hydrobox merged their intellectual proprietary rights to develop a containerized hydropower plant dubbed hydrobox. This innovation is standardized, containerized and remotely monitored power plant that combines different innovative technologies to provide an adequate answer to the challenges most traditional hydropower plants face.The project has the potential to be a scalable solution for the improvement and development of sustainable renewable energy in Kenya to realize SDG 7 while contributing to clean and safe environment enshrined in the Constitution of Kenya. With power generation from this plant, the parties estimate that the project will generate a net annual revenue of Kes. 22 million annually for the next 25 years.
