Our Story

wPower Foundation’s journey started when founder Jodie Wu took her first D-Lab class in 2008, where she could finally apply her engineering skills with a purpose.  She dove straight into social enterprise as a 22-year-old, moving to Tanzania to build and grow what would later become a last-mile distribution company that she sold in 2017 to Greenlight Planet, now known as Sun King. During her time in Tanzania, Jodie grew her staff to more than 80 Tanzanians to deliver life-improving solar lanterns, clean cookstoves, and agricultural tools to over 100,000 families

When Jodie studied mechanical engineering at MIT, 50% of her class was female.  Fast forward a decade later, Jodie soon found herself at OffGridBox, working as one of the too few women-led energy companies in the sector.  Jodie had to do something about it, and thus wPower RDC was founded by three female engineers…representing 3 different engineering sectors, 3 different countries, and 3 different languages.

wPower Foundation was a response to start a movement to support more women in the sector.  

Jodie today stands as an exited founder, a serial entrepreneur with companies across 4 countries, and a voice in the social enterprise and international development space.  Jodie has advised dozens of fellow entrepreneurs entering the East African market and consulted for various energy companies to bring in new services, including battery swapping, pay-as-you-go solar, minigrids, C&I solar, and clean cookstoves. Jodie was named one of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s America’s Most Promising Entrepreneurs in 2010 and Forbes’ 30 under 30 in 2011. She is also a 2010 Echoing Green Fellow, 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow, 2012 Ashoka Emerging Innovator, 2013 D-Lab Scale-Ups Fellow, and 2016 C3E International Award Winner.