Good morning. Nairobi, jambo. Well, that was actually the conclusion: Africa can, Africa will, and Africa must. That was not a conclusion, that was an introduction. I tell you, it's always good to be back in Nairobi. What I have to share with you is a story. I invite you to rewind in time.
In 1999, last century, most of you young people in the room were not born. And I came here, I was living in Africa at that time working for Schneider. And I created the first office of Schneider in East Africa. And I've not stopped — we've not stopped investing. And I've not stopped coming here in East Africa and in the whole of Africa to develop partnerships and our presence. To tell you why we are here in Africa: we are in Africa because what we do at Schneider has even more sense in Africa. Let me share a story. A few years ago here in Nairobi, the teams came to me and to us and they proposed a project about a clinic. That clinic had good equipment, but because electric power was not stable, they couldn't store medicine, and women didn't dare to come to the clinic to deliver babies because they wouldn't know if power would be available at the time they would deliver. So we did the project: a smart grid — a small grid, a microgrid, sorry — with solar and with batteries, which made the power stable and reliable 24/7. And since then, vaccine is available in this clinic, and women come to deliver babies. This was reinforced when I left Africa and went to Paris to become the CEO of the company and then the chairman of the company. That was more than 20 years ago. I came to the leadership of the company with one very strong conviction: that energy is a fundamental human right. And truly, access to energy is a passport to a decent life. It's actually the passport to progress. And when you get access to energy, you also get access to digital. And digital is another passport. It's the one to education and economic inclusion. So when you get access to your first energy, then you get access to progress, to education, and to economic inclusion.
And from that, we built Schneider with a mission to develop technologies to offer progress and sustainability for all. To everyone, everywhere, every time. Which other country is the best example for progress on sustainability? Kenya is a super young country. Average age is below 20 years old. People are hungry for progress, for prosperity, for success. And at the same time, the fantastic nature here reminds us every day of the imperative of sustainability. So when you look at what's happening here, Schneider has been an actor for the past 30 years since I created Schneider in Kenya. And Kenya, what I love, it's not a place where there is only an ambition and a plan. It's a place which is executing on the ambition. In 2013, only 37% of the people had access to energy. Today, 80% of the population has access to energy, which is incredible progress. Plus, 90% of this energy is clean, coming mostly from geothermal and hydro. So Kenya has created the base for energy to support the development of the economy.
Now, zoom out to the whole of Africa. Schneider is the world leader in energy tech, and I can tell you that Africa will be the epicenter of energy for the next 25 years. 600 million people don't have access today to energy. The next 1 billion people will be born in Africa. That is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is the scale, the magnitude of what we have to build here together. But the opportunity is that there is no place in the world that will build more cities, more industries, more technology, more data centers, more AI, because Africa is digital native. People are young, and they want — we want here to benefit from the power of AI.
So when you look at my industry, which is about technology, this acceleration of Africa is coming just at the juncture of two revolutions in the field of technology. The first one is AI in the field of digitalization. Look back at the past 15 years. IoT, big data, digital twins came to maturity, and now you can inject at every level artificial intelligence. On the electric side, it used to be one way to do electrification. And now you've got renewable storage, which means you can be decentralized, you can be on spot for every application. So Africa must leapfrog. It must put in place solutions which have never been deployed before. Places which are digitized from the power plant to the plug, a connection that was not existing, and energy systems which are mixing fossil, renewable, centralized, decentralized, and intelligence at every level.
On that, Schneider, we accompany Africa not only on the clinic I was mentioning. We do here the largest and most advanced data centers like IX Africa here and Icolo here in Nairobi. We do here the most advanced refineries, pipelines like at the moment in Uganda, in Tanzania, in Nigeria with long good here with other companies. We support the digitalization and the decarbonization of cities all over Africa. The most important challenge here, if we want to deploy technologies, will be as always people, which is the foundation of every transformation. And on that, happy to announce that number one, this week I'm going to be inaugurating our new office here in Nairobi. And number two, we're going to be signing with this university among other universities in Africa a massive program of energy transformation and energy lab to train the next generation and the existing professionals in the newer technologies. So it's all about partnership. In this room, we are all engaged in the transformation and this massive acceleration of Africa. Be sure of one thing: Schneider wants to be your energy tech partner in this transformation. Thank you. Asante sana.
