A letter from Katherine Lucey, CEO and Founder of Solar Sister
Today, I am excited to share some important news about Solar Sister!
For the past 15 years, Solar Sister has been on an amazing journey. Starting as simple but powerful initiative to bring solar power and light to families and communities that didn’t have access to energy, Solar Sister has grown into a leading social enterprise working at the nexus of gender equity, energy access, and climate resilience.
At Solar Sister, we invest in local women entrepreneurs to start, grow, and sustain successful clean energy businesses so they can build a brighter future for themselves, their families, and the world. In the powerful words of the late Kofi Annan: “There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.” Today Solar Sister has supported over 11,000 local women clean energy entrepreneurs across sub-Saharan Africa and reached over 5 million people with energy access.
All this has been done with your incredible support, the commitment of the Solar Sister Entrepreneurs, and the dedication of my incredible team. With heart and soul and plenty of hard work, together, we have built a sustainable social enterprise and a strong team of local leaders who will carry Solar Sister’s mission into the future with vigor.
Solar Sister is at a catalytic moment with a bright future ahead! From the very beginning, I dreamed of a day when Solar Sister would develop into a movement led by local women and leadership responsibility and authority would be fully transferred to be held in proximate hands. I am thrilled to announce that that day has come! Solar Sister is ready to move to an exciting new phase under the leadership of a newly appointed CEO, Olasimbo Sojinrin.
Olasimbo is uniquely qualified to take on this new role. Many of you already know Olasimbo as the inaugural Country Director for Solar Sister Nigeria and, more recently as the COO for Solar Sister global operations. In addition to over 10 years of increasing senior roles within Solar Sister, she brings her lived experience in Nigeria as well as a deeply committed role as an activist in the broader community working toward gender equity, clean energy access, and climate resilience.
Olasimbo takes over the position on January 1, 2025, with the full enthusiastic support of Solar Sister’s Board of Directors and my own heartfelt gratitude for her succession. And so it is with a hopeful and confident heart that I hand the leadership over to Olasimbo. It has been the honor and privilege of my life to work alongside this team and so many of you to bring Solar Sister to this place of strength and bright possibility.
To end on a personal note, I will continue to support Solar Sister and the mission of light, hope, and opportunity as Senior Advisor and as the number one fan of Olasimbo and her network of Solar Sister Entrepreneurs across all of sub-Saharan Africa. I am excited to see what comes next for this incredible team.
You are all invited to join me and Olasimbo for a celebratory COFFEE CHAT on Wednesday, December 11th, at 10 am EST to to celebrate and share what’s next.