As a teenager, Washikala Malango’s family fled a brutal civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, walking for hundreds of miles and crossing Africa’s second-biggest lake in a creaky wooden boat before landing in a refugee camp in Tanzania. After years in makeshift schools, Malango won a German-funded scholarship to university in Dar es Salaam, then later spent three months at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and three months working at San Francisco startup SolarCity Corp. But he always dreamed of returning home. “We really wanted to do something to eradicate energy poverty in the DRC,” Malango says. “The security situation was still unstable, but against all of that we decided to come.”
In 2013 he and his childhood friend Iongwa Mashangao moved back to their native city, Baraka, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika and founded Altech Group, a business selling solar-powered lanterns. Early on they focused on teachers, doctors, nurses and others with reliable paychecks from the state, deducting regular payments from their salaries.
