Fresh out of school, young Excel Obumneme Amaefule, like many Nigerians who, after completing their tertiary education, are mandated to serve their motherland for one year under the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), would rediscover himself through an experience that saw him integrate his engineering knowledge and systems-thinking approach into a new path focused on human-centred research.
During his NYSC, Excel’s Community Development Service (CDS) project, known as Google Digital Onboarder CDS, gave him his first experience of working directly with small businesses. Through the project, he and other participants helped small businesses leverage Google tools to improve their productivity, sales, and online presence.
The experience sparked his interest in working on projects that were more focused on people and communities. He subsequently became involved with the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), where his interest in human-centred projects grew further and began to shape the direction of his work.
It was in 2021, at Ogale Community Secondary School, in one of the rural areas of Eleme Local Government Area of Rivers State. While many would have tried to find their way back to Julius Berger, one of Nigeria’s largest construction and engineering companies, where he completed a six-month internship as a civil engineering student at Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Excel discovered a new path — one that he suddenly realised he was more passionate about.
He became interested in research focused on improving the lives of Nigerians living in rural communities, many of whom lack access and inclusion to clean water, electricity, digital banking, and reliable digital connectivity.
“That experience made me feel like, ‘Oh, I’m more passionate about working with people than working with projects,” he told TechMedia Africa in an hour-long conversation.
“After that experience, I started getting more interested in community-driven projects rather than going back into Civil Engineering where he felt he could use the skills gained from his engineering background, ” he said.
The journey as a researcher began
Fortunately for Excel, a research opportunity opened up soon afterwards, and he took it in a heartbeat.
It was a research project for a PhD candidate at the University of Oklahoma, where he was tasked, as the lead research assistant in charge of Rivers State, with collecting data to understand how small and medium-sized businesses perceive renewable energy and their willingness to adopt it.
The research covered Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones. In the South-South region, Rivers State — the country’s eighth-most populous state and a major oil-producing state — became the core location where Excel and his team focused their efforts because of its concentration of markets and businesses. In total, they sampled 212 businesses from seven districts in Rivers State.
The Oklahoma renewable-energy research project became Excel’s first exposure to the deficiency of data, how endemic the problem was and the challenges surrounding energy transition.
“One of the critical things I noticed, both through my work in SDSN and that energy justice project that we did, was the issue of data,” he said.
Nigeria, a country of more than 240 million people spread across 923,768 square kilometres, is plagued by a lack of reliable, localised data that would be crucial to developing home-grown solutions.
For instance, Nigeria has not conducted a population census in the past 20 years. The last one, held in March 2006, estimated the country’s population at about 140 million.
Despite the absence of a recent formal population count and the lack of a centralised system that adequately records births and deaths, Nigeria’s population has in recent years been estimated at more than 240 million. UNICEF and the National Population Commission have also highlighted gaps in birth registration, with many children born outside formal health facilities and therefore difficult to track.
This issue of data, or the lack of it, was something Excel faced first-hand.
“We had very little data to track activities. There was no baseline data. So, if there was baseline data, the projects we were doing would have been complementary. We would have been checking something against what already existed,” he said in a tone of frustration.
With his research experience, Excel decided to apply for a master’s degree under the Commonwealth Scholarship. His journey as a renewable-energy researcher and an advocate for empowering the next generation of African researchers continued through the work he does with Eden Resilience Action Lab, a research hub he founded.
Excel takes on the task of tackling Nigeria’s energy problem through research
One of Nigeria’s most pressing problems is access to electricity. From Chibok in Borno State and isolated rural communities like Dasham in Plateau State to commercial cities like Ikeja in Lagos and Port Harcourt in Rivers State, millions of Nigerians lack reliable access to electricity and weak inclusion to decision-making.
The World Bank estimates that between 85 million and more than 90 million people in Nigeria lack access to electricity or do not have reliable access to it, representing roughly 40% to 43% of the country’s population. This makes Nigeria the country with the largest population without access to electricity in the world.
The lack of electricity, or the unreliability of supply, has forced many Nigerians to become producers of their own electricity, powering their homes and businesses with generators or, increasingly, solar panels that are beginning to dot the rooftops of homes and businesses across the country.
For many years, successive governments have introduced measures aimed at improving electricity access. The Electricity Act, signed into law by President Bola Tinubu, for instance, opened up the sector further by allowing states to generate, transmit, and distribute electricity under certain conditions.
In the renewable-energy segment, which could be a pathway to addressing energy poverty in the country, policies such as the Energy Transition Plan (ETP) and the National Energy Master Plan (NEMP), as well as programmes such as the World Bank-backed Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-Up (DARES) programme, have been introduced.
DARES is expected to provide new or improved electricity access to more than 17.5 million Nigerians through distributed renewable-energy solutions. Yet, the problem persists.
But researcher Excel believes that a deeper question sits beneath the obvious problem of lack of access to electricity, and even the poverty that comes with energy deprivation.
If, as the ETP projects, Nigeria is to achieve universal energy access by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2060, the challenge for researchers would be to look beyond the policy documents and examine how this energy transition is actually evolving.
How are renewable-energy policies being implemented across Nigeria’s many communities?
To understand how various renewable-energy policies and projects are being implemented, Excel and his team are working to build a tracker modelled after the Net Zero Tracker, a platform that tracks countries, companies and other entities and their net-zero commitments and plans.
The focus, he said, is to create a framework based on data collected from communities across Nigeria and map out how the country’s energy transition is evolving.
Interestingly, although troubling, what Excel found was that the non-economic impacts of Nigeria’s energy transition pose a major problem.
Access to energy has long been viewed, and rightly so, through the lens of its relationship with economic power. The more energy a person has access to and uses, the more likely they are to be lifted out of poverty.
However, there is also the issue of energy justice — a concept that argues that all people should share equally in the benefits of energy systems while addressing the health, economic, and environmental burdens placed on historically disadvantaged communities.
“Our work in understanding energy transition in Nigeria is not just to track perception, but also the impact on gender-related roles and policy roles,” Excel said.
He said that in one of the communities studied, the data showed that women felt they had more free time because of the renewable-energy project introduced in the area.
“But then the question we’re asking is: the more free time you’re having, are you having more time to take on more household chores, or are you having more free time to get more self-agency?” he asked.
In one of the research papers he co-authored, titled Energy justice in practice: Non-economic impacts of Nigeria’s renewable energy transition and published by Cambridge University Press, the study found that Nigeria’s renewable-energy transition currently falters across four foundational dimensions of energy justice: procedural, distributional, recognitional, and restorative justice.
These questions run through more than one study. In a companion paper, Energy justice in policy: assessing renewable energy and energy transition frameworks in Nigeria, also in Cambridge Prisms: Energy Transitions, Excel and his co-authors turn the same four-part justice lens on the country’s flagship frameworks themselves, the Energy Transition Plan and the National Energy Master Plan among them, asking not just whether the policies exist but whether they are built to share benefits and burdens fairly.
The findings drew enough interest that Nairametrics ran an exclusive interview with him on the study. He also coordinates a Frontiers in Energy Research collection, Beyond the Economics, a guest-editor role he took on in 2026 without yet holding a doctorate, a rarity for the journal, which now gathers lots of contributions on the social and non-market sides of energy that his own work keeps returning to.
The dearth of research data and how Excel is tackling it
For Nigeria not to reproduce the same inequalities it is trying to solve through its energy transition, Excel believes the country needs to go back to the basis — education.
The question, in his view, is not only whether Nigeria has the policies, funding or technology needed to transition to renewable energy justly. It is also whether the country has enough people capable of asking the right questions, collecting the right data and producing the research needed to understand how those policies and technologies are affecting communities.
For a country seeking universal energy access by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2060, the absence of this capacity could prove costly.
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But Excel does not believe that Nigeria necessarily lacks people who can do research. The problem, he argues, is that the number of researchers and research organisations working across the country is still disproportionately small compared with the scale of the problems they are expected to solve.
“In my little experience so far, I’ll say we have researchers. We have people. We have organisations doing this already,” he said.
For him, the gap begins in the university system.
“We treat schools as places to get degrees,” he said. “Universities are places where people get degrees rather than where people get solutions.”
It is a distinction that, for Excel, goes to the heart of why Nigeria continues to struggle with research and data.
Universities, he argues, have increasingly become institutions where students obtain certificates that they can take into the labour market, rather than places where they are trained to identify problems and develop solutions that can be applied to their communities.
But the problem does not end with the quality or relevance of research produced in universities.
Excel believes the education system should be structured to close that gap before students graduate.
Rather than making students wait until the end of their education to undertake a six-month industrial training programme — an opportunity that not every student gets — he suggests that practical experience should become a formal part of the university curriculum.
“Instead of waiting for you to do six months’ internship — and not everyone does that — you can have a module that is an experience module.”
Building a pipeline of young researchers
It is this gap that Excel is now attempting to address through Eden Resilience Action Lab, the research hub he founded.
Rather than simply identifying the lack of research capacity as a problem, Excel has been trying to create an alternative pathway through which young researchers can gain the experience, mentorship, financial support and recognition they often struggle to find.
The approach is built around the idea that young researchers should not have to wait until they are established academics before they can participate in meaningful research.
For students and young researchers who may not have the financial resources, mentorship or networks needed to pursue research, even relatively small amounts of support can make a difference.
Excel points to stipends as one example.
“A small stipend of ₦50,000, ₦100,000, ₦150,000, to support you and say, okay, just do this thing,” he said.
But the support goes beyond money aimed at incentivizing researchers, and even beyond simply publishing the research as academic papers.
For Excel, the research process should help identify problems that can then become the basis for more localised research and, ultimately, interventions.
In that sense, Excel’s approach to solving Africa’s data problem is not simply about collecting more information. It is about creating a pipeline — from education to research, from research to data, and from data to solutions — while ensuring that the young people doing the work also benefit from the process.
Since its establishment in 2024, the research hub has supported over seven research projects, five of which Excel said have been published. It has also provided stipends to seven researchers.
For a continent facing problems that range from energy poverty, energy injustice and climate change to healthcare, water access and the digital divide, Excel believes Africa cannot afford to have millions of young people pass through its universities without being given the opportunity to participate in solving those problems.
Increasingly, his work reaches beyond Nigeria. For example, through the Innovate4Environment programme, run by The Energy and Resources Institute and the University of Warwick’s WMG and funded by the British Council, Excel is extending the same energy justice approach to diasporans and migrant communities in the UK, building a tool that helps people find the energy support they are entitled to but rarely told about, while also using it as an evidence base for policy advocacy and project development.