Dr Olufolahan Osunmuyiwa is a sustainability and innovation consultant with a PhD in Energy and Environmental Studies from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work is about sustainable electrification, energy sufficiency, and societal transformation in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. At Heriot-Watt, Olufolahan is part of the interdisciplinary research group at the Institute for Sustainable Building Design. Olufolahan has ample experience with the electricity sector in East and Southern Africa and has conducted numerous monitoring and evaluation exercises for NGOs and donor foundations on energy access projects in the region. She has worked in collaboration with the Low Carbon Community Development Network (LCEDN) and the University of Strathclyde as a Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE) consultant at Community Energy Malawi. At CEM, she performed M&E services on existing Solar systems in rural villages and gave recommendations on the DEO trial to the Malawian government. In Autumn 2019, she won an €11,000 Mott Foundation grant to evaluate the impacts of CEFA’s mini-grid project on gender-inclusive productive usage of electricity in rural Tanzania. Within this scope, she also works with researchers at the Chalmers University of Technology Gothenburg where she is focused on redesigning small-scale electric systems in a gender-sensitive way to promote equal opportunity for socially inclusive entrepreneurship in rural communities of Tanzania and Rwanda. Currently, Olufolahan leads the TRANSFORM project – a £34,000 HW Scottish Funding Council, Pump Priming Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) grant involving the UK, and Nigerian partners which aims to advance knowledge on the potential for socio-economically inclusive sustainable energy solutions (SES) to transform agricultural value-chains across sub-Saharan Africa. In general, her work explores the transformative nature of sustainable energy systems/solutions and how its provision impacts socio-economic, class, and gender dynamics within local contexts.
