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Nigeria’s Heat Crisis Is Fueling a New Wave of Startups

MaraviPost Leave a comment

LAGOS, Nigeria, 29 April 2026 -/African Media Agency(AMA)/ – As heat intensifies across Nigeria, a new cohort of ventures is developing solutions to protect crops, reduce food spoilage and livestock losses, and equip hospitals and outdoor workers to anticipate and withstand extreme conditions.

BFA Global, FSD Africa, ClimateWorks Foundation, and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) Nigeria have selected 10 early-stage ventures to join the inaugural cohort of the TECA Heat Action Wave (THAW) program focused on accelerating solutions to extreme heat.

The 10 selected ventures are:

  • Ofemini Global Limited provides a heat-resilient logistics platform that helps farmers transport perishable goods efficiently, reducing spoilage caused by extreme temperatures through optimized routing and heat monitoring.
  • Agiletech Operations Consulting Limited provides a hyperlocal early-warning system that delivers climate and heat alerts through accessible channels, enabling farmers and micro-entrepreneurs to anticipate risks and take preventive action.
  • Emplaris develops a predictive energy and heat-risk intelligence system for healthcare facilities, helping hospitals anticipate outages and manage equipment stress during extreme heat events.
  • Doorcas Africa delivers an AI-powered livestock health and co-ownership platform that enables early disease detection and prevention, helping farmers reduce heat-related livestock mortality and improve productivity.
  • Farmxic offers an AI-driven soil and crop diagnostics platform that helps farmers adapt to heat-induced soil degradation and crop stress through real-time insights and personalized recommendations.
  • Farm Fresh Grocery Ltd. builds a climate-resilient agricultural system combining heat-adaptive beekeeping, herb production, and consumer products to stabilize yields and supply under rising temperatures.
  • Farmslate Technologies Limited provides a climate intelligence platform that translates satellite and weather data into actionable insights, enabling farmers and financial institutions to manage heat-related risks and improve decision-making.
  • Let-It-Cold offers a solar-powered, portable cooling solution that helps small businesses and households preserve perishable goods during extreme heat and power outages.
  • Pod develops a climate-resilient sanitation system that prevents failure and contamination in heat- and flood-prone environments through on-site treatment and water reuse.
  • TheHyWing Ltd provides a climate-smart digital health platform that combines heat alerts, AI diagnostics, and telemedicine to prevent heat-related health risks among outdoor workers and vulnerable populations.

Together, the ventures address some of the most immediate and under-addressed impacts of extreme heat across Nigeria, including food spoilage and cold chain gaps, heat-induced soil degradation and crop stress, livestock disease and productivity loss, health risks for outdoor workers, and system failures in energy, healthcare, and sanitation infrastructure. They range from early-stage concepts to minimum viable products, reflecting both the urgency of the problem and the early development of solutions in this emerging space.

The cohort reflects a growing innovation ecosystem across Nigeria, with ventures operating in multiple regions. The companies are based in Lagos, Kaduna, and Edo States. This geographic spread underscores the breadth of climate innovation emerging across the country and reinforces TECA’s commitment to supporting founders building locally relevant solutions nationwide.

Selected from a competitive pool, the ventures will each receive $56,000 in funding along with hands-on venture-acceleration support, including user validation, product development, business model design, and investor readiness. Each team will work with embedded venture builders and technical experts to accelerate their path to scale. Six of the ten selected ventures have a female co-founder.

“Extreme heat is rapidly becoming one of the biggest operational risks facing African economies, yet it remains dramatically underinvested,” said Tyler Ferdinand, TECA Director at BFA Global. “Through TECA’s Heat Action Wave, we’re backing entrepreneurs building the tools, services, and financial products that will allow people, businesses, and cities to function in a hotter world. Our goal is not only to support these ventures but to prove that climate adaptation can become a powerful new investment frontier.”

Juliet Munro, Director, Early Stage Finance, at FSD Africa, said: “If climate adaptation finance is going to scale in Africa, it has to be grounded in real, investable solutions. This group of innovators tackling extreme heat is important because it shows what those solutions look like in practice, and that’s what gives markets the confidence to follow. At FSD Africa, our role is to help turn early innovation like this into something markets can actually back.”

“The cost of inaction on climate change is growing, as over 70% of workers around the world are at risk from deadly extreme heat. At the same time, momentum for adaptation is growing, as we see both more funding and more innovation. These new business ventures are strong, community-led solutions that can accelerate resilience in Nigeria and more broadly in the West African region,” said Jessica Brown, Senior Director of Adaptation and Resilience at ClimateWorks Foundation.

“Responding to climate change is central to Nigeria’s future growth and resilience. The UK is excited to support this cohort of ambitious Nigerian businesses developing transformative solutions to extreme heat. TECA’s Heat Action Wave is part of a broader UK partnership with Nigeria that backs private sector–led innovation, creates jobs, and drives shared prosperity for both our countries as we transition to a greener economy,” said Temi Akinrinade, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Nigeria.

The program will run through 2026, culminating in demo days and investor engagement opportunities, with follow-on support available for top-performing ventures.

Distributed by African Media Agency (AMA) on behalf of BFA Global

About BFA Global
BFA Global is an impact innovation firm that combines research, advisory, venture building, and investment expertise to build a more inclusive, equitable, and resilient future for underserved people and the planet. We partner with leading public, private and philanthropic organisations, global and local, to catalyse innovation ecosystems for impact across emerging markets. Since 2006, we have completed 646 projects completed in over 107 countries, supported 250+ ventures in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, who have collectively raised $1B+ in follow-on funding, and have a survival rate above 80% (global average is ~20%), and built a network of 100+ global and African investors, innovators, and funders. Learn more at https://bfaglobal.com/.

About FSD Africa
FSD Africa is a specialist development agency funded through UK Development operating in more than 30 countries working to help make finance work for Africa’s future. Based in Nairobi, FSD Africa’s team of financial sector experts work alongside governments, business leaders, regulators, and policymakers to achieve policy and regulatory reform, capacity strengthening, and improving financial infrastructure, to address systemic challenges in Africa’s financial markets. Since 2017, the organisation’s strategy has evolved to prioritise solutions to Africa’s most critical challenges: economic, social, and environmental. The organisation has worked to promote investment into the continent’s green economy, as well as its rates of financial inclusion and gender equality. FSD Africa – previously known as Financial Sector Deepening Africa – was founded in 2012 and is based in Nairobi, Kenya. For more information, please visit:https://www.fsdafrica.org

About ClimateWorks Foundation
ClimateWorks Foundation is a catalyst for accelerating climate progress, driving bold solutions that benefit people and the planet. We connect funders and implementing organizations worldwide to create and scale transformative solutions across sectors and geographies, achieving faster, greater impact together. Since 2008, ClimateWorks has granted over $2 billion to more than 850 grantees across 50 countries, working alongside 80 funders.

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Lifestyle

Skeptical Africa: Understanding the Past, Engaging the Present, and Exploring the Future

Leo Igwe Leave a comment

By Leo Igwe

Africa is widely acknowledged as the cradle of humanity and the sphere where modern homo sapiens emerged hundreds of thousands of years ago. However, a key element and characteristic of modern humanity, skepticism,  is often not associated with Africa or Africans.

Modern or contemporary Africa is often conceptualized in relation to magic, the occult, and other canons of primordial mind, life, and existence.  A representation of Africa and the African as a ‘noble savage’, engaged in traditionalizing modernity or modernizing tradition, is a covert and overt staple in anthropological discourses.  “Modernity of witchcraft….in Africa”! Does that expression sound familiar? 

Western anthropologists and their African acolytes have adamantly been prolific in conceiving skeptical rationality as we know it as alien to the thought and culture of Africans. They have deemed and designated a central mechanism of sapiens, the propeller of human emergence, a Euro-American import and a legacy of colonial incursions. Scholars have largely ignored the fact that the colonial package and baggage included religious absurdities, Christian and Islamic irrationalisms, and Western and Eastern nonsense that have continued to wreak havoc across the region and the globe. African post-coloniality has been codified as essentially a resurgence of the occult, and an unyielding ubiquity of magical efflorescence. 

Unreason and barbarism from east and west, from Europe, America, and Asia, reinforced by local formations, have been presented as the mainstay of African ‘civilization’. This racist scholarship must be disrupted. The continent is portrayed as bound and trapped, as caught up in an inexorable and inescapable web of misinterpretation and misrepresentation that finds its latest version in indigenous/alternative knowledge systems. Search and research on indigenous/alternative knowledge is the latest academic fashion. African scholars and students are falling head over heels valorizing the past and glorifying ancient thoughts using exotic epithets that drip more with identity politics like ‘African science’, ‘African logic’, ‘African philosophy’, ‘African medicine’, etc. 

Upon closer examination, one realizes a romanticization of primitive ideas, a framing of Western and human antiquity as African modernity, western superstition is African science, western illogic as African logic, western barbarism as African ‘civilization’ and ‘enlightenment’, permanently sealing the African state of underdevelopment.

These misrepresentations abound and darken the region; they encumber progressive, liberative, renaissant, and emancipatory thoughts and scholarship, which Africa urgently needs. This trend of misinformation must constantly be called out, pummeled, and fiercely challenged in furtherance of a skeptical awakening of Africa, Africans, and Africanists.

Skeptics in Africa propose that science is science. Technology is technology. Philosophy is philosophy. Logic is logic. Medicine is medicine. These areas of knowledge, their methods, and principles are universally applicable. There is nothing like African, Nigerian, or Ethiopian science. There is nothing like African, Akan, Igbo, or Igbira logic. There is nothing like African medicine as an alternative to Western medicine. Either it is medicine, or it is not. The alternative to medicine is not-medicine.

In both ancient and modern, colonial and post-colonial dispensations, anthropologists have exoticized and traditionalized Africans. Irrational and superstitious phenomena such as witchcraft have been explained as having enormous social value, utility, inner logic, and rational coherence for Africans. Meanwhile, nothing can be farther from the truth, logic, reason, and fact. 

Although not as established or organised as in the West, skepticism, rational and scientific sentiments, demand for evidence, and critical reasoning feature in African cultures and societies. In my village in southeastern Nigeria, as in other communities across the region, there are skeptics, doubters, and disbelievers. Critical examination of religious and paranormal claims is a part of public discussions. People ask for evidence for claims. They seek and demand proof for propositions. Skeptical rationality is embedded in local debates and deliberations, including religious, irreligious, social, cultural, and traditional exchanges. 

Skeptical moments have also manifested in the formation and operation of humanist, atheist, and freethought groups in the region, especially in attempts to combat religion/superstition-based abuses and promote critical thinking in schools.

In charting the future in Africa, skeptics are actively combating abuses linked to witchcraft beliefs, dogmatic traditions, and ritual attacks. Witch hunting, which western anthropologists have described as fulfilling socially stabilizing purposes and functions, is wreaking so much havoc in the lives of Africans. Many Africans are fighting back. Many Africans are resisting witch hunters and other superstition based abusers.

For instance, in March, a local mob attacked and beat to death a 46-year-old lady accused of penis theft in Zambia in southern Africa. Some of the perpetrators have been arrested and are being prosecuted. People accused of penis theft have been beaten and killed in Nigeria. Across Africa, many people believe that some humans have the power to magically steal or disappear their private parts, especially the male organ. This belief has no basis in reason, science or reality. In Nigeria, a 70-year-old lady accused of witchcraft has not been seen since November last year. It is believed that her accuser abducted her, tied a stone around her neck, and threw her into the river. 

In a related development, a young man murdered his 24-year-old girlfriend allegedly for ritual purposes. Witch hunts and ritual attacks take place with impunity. Every year, thousands of women, children, and elderly persons are accused and abused. The Advocacy for Alleged Witches works and campaigns to ensure justice for alleged witches, victims and survivors of ritual attacks and their families. AfAW organises public education programs, provides legal representation and humanitarian support for victims. 

Skeptics promote critical thinking and scientific temper in schools. Critical thinking skills are important in checkmating the ravages of dogmatic and superstitious beliefs. Critical thinking skills are among the top and most sought-after skills in the world. Skeptics campaign to introduce the teaching of critical thinking or philosophy for children as a subject in primary and secondary schools. Skeptics facilitate inquiry-based learning using questionstorm or the technique of thinking in terms of questions. The school system emphasizes memorization, answer driven learning and reproduction of what is taught.

Questionstorm makes interrogation of experiences or challenging claims the test of knowledge and a measure of intelligence. It is predicated on questioning together as a form of thinking/learning together. Through the Critical Thinking Social Empowerment Foundation, skeptics facilitate teacher training, develop learning materials, organize workshops, and implement pilot programs in schools. Skeptics work to realize a more critical-thinking and philosophically oriented society.

Leo Igwe is a skeptic and speaker at the 50th CSICON Anniversary Conference in Buffalo New York in June.