My father built solar systems across Africa long before it was fashionable. He was the one who first took me to the continent — I was 15, and I remember stepping off the plane and feeling like I already knew the place. My mother is South African. Africa was never foreign to me. But that trip made it mine.

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I spent the next 20 years building on what he started. CAA Energy — the company I now run — delivers solar infrastructure across 15 countries for UNHCR, UNICEF, the World Food Programme and others. We know how to install systems that last. We've done it thousands of times.

But the big contracts don't reach everywhere.

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They don't reach the school with 80 children studying by candlelight because the solar budget ran out before this village. They don't reach the orphanage where children take turns going to school because the monthly fee is €20 and nobody has €20. They don't reach the kitchen where women cook over open fires every single day, breathing smoke that slowly destroys their lungs.

Those gaps are what ENGO is for.

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I started it not because I had extra time — I don't — but because I couldn't keep seeing those gaps and doing nothing about the ones I could actually close. ENGO runs lean by design. No layers of administration. No long decision chains. We find the specific need, we fund it precisely, we document everything, and we show every single donor where their money went.

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My daughter Lennie is 14. She is the youth ambassador of this company. She gets it. The gap between what a child needs and what they have is not abstract when you've sat with them.

That's the point of ENGO. To make it concrete. To make €4 not feel like a small thing — because in Africa, it isn't.

— Nici