James Irungu Mwangi

Kenya

This entrepreneur dreams of a Great Carbon Valley, where CO₂ can be captured and stored in the Rift Valley using renewable energy.

A Kenyan economist who graduated from Harvard, James Irungu Mwangi is the founder and CEO of Africa Climate Ventures, an investment holding company. He also co-founded the Dalberg Group, where he led the firm’s expansion across Africa. A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and a Yale World Fellow, he received the Climate Breakthrough Award in 2022. His dream is to transform the Great Rift Valley, which stretches thousands of kilometres across the continent from the Red Sea to Mozambique, into a Great Carbon Valley—the decarbonised equivalent of California’s Silicon Valley.

He is convinced that, thanks to its geological, geothermal, wind and solar resources, the Rift Valley can become the epicentre of a low-carbon world and ultimately achieve carbon neutrality. Its subsoil, composed in part of porous basalt, is ideally suited to technologies that capture and store carbon from the atmosphere. Energy from underground hot-water sources could then power these carbon-capture and storage facilities with ease. Geothermal energy, which has been harnessed at Olkaria since the 1980s, already supplies Kenya with nearly 40% of its electricity and is helping put the country on track to meet its goal of 100% renewable electricity by 2030. “We need to get rid of the idea that Africa is a helpless victim of climate change.” On the contrary, “our continent and its people have the potential to be at the forefront” of the energy transition. The convergence of these emerging technologies with the continent’s natural resources and large labour force could help solve the energy and climate equation. “The continent that has contributed least to climate change can make the greatest contribution to fighting it—and become carbon-negative by capturing more CO₂ than it emits.”