University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom. September 7-8, 2026
At the Ayrton AfOx Academic Symposium, the ACE-FUELS Director argued that next-generation energy research must be done where the technology will be deployed, and called for technology skills development on a scale of a billion young Africans.
“Technologies for Africa Must Be Developed in Africa’s Conditions” – Oguzie at Ayrton–AfOx Symposium: Calls for Energy Technology Skills Development for a Billion Young Africans.
Professor Emeka E. Oguzie, FAS, Professor of Electrochemistry and Materials Science at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, and Director of the Africa Centre of Excellence in Future Energies and Electrochemical Systems (ACE-FUELS), has told an Oxford symposium that the global research base for next-generation solar technology has been built under conditions that do not exist across most of Africa.
Speaking at the Ayrton–AfOx Academic Symposium at the University of Oxford on 7 and 8 September, Professor Oguzie noted that perovskite photovoltaics has been developed almost entirely in temperate laboratories, and that its standards carry that origin. Modules are qualified by cooling them to minus forty degrees Celsius, and the process windows recorded in the literature are mapped at twenty to forty per cent relative humidity.
“Nigeria has never recorded minus forty degrees,” he said. “What our modules endure is sustained sixty to seventy-five degrees at high humidity, essentially every day of the year. Owerri sits above seventy per cent humidity for much of the year.”
That, he argued, is an opportunity rather than a grievance. “It is an unmapped region of the science, and we are standing in it. A European laboratory can simulate our humidity in a chamber, but it will not run a twelve-month fabrication campaign inside one, and it has no reason to. It can model a dusty spectrum; it cannot measure ours.”
He was careful to locate the cause. “None of these gaps exists because the questions are uninteresting. They exist because the people with the equipment are not standing in the conditions that make the questions urgent.”
The capital floor
Professor Oguzie argued that a decade of energy skills programming has stalled on an unexamined difference between digital and physical technology.
“Skilling in information technology scales at almost no marginal cost. A laptop and a connection, and the twentieth learner costs what the first did,” he said. “Energy technology has a capital floor under it. Nobody learns cell fabrication or electrochemical characterisation on a screen. There is no software substitute for a potentiostat.”
Africa, he said, does not have anywhere near enough spaces equipped for energy research and innovation. He called for technology skills development reaching a billion young Africans, achievable only through laboratories, equipment and production facilities distributed across localities.
Whose agenda
A central outcome of the symposium was agreement that partners in the Global South must be involved in setting research agendas rather than recruited into priorities set elsewhere; a conclusion Professor Oguzie welcomed as consistent with his long-standing position that technologies for African conditions should be developed by institutions standing in those conditions.
He argued that agenda-setting authority alone is not enough, however. A laboratory with complete freedom over its priorities can still conduct research designed for somewhere else, because the standards against which work is qualified, the reviewers who assess it and the citations that reward it all point towards temperate deployment.
“You can hold the pen and still be writing someone else’s paper,” he said.
The framework behind it
The argument draws on Research 7.x, a framework Professor Oguzie has developed and published, which extends the research lifecycle beyond the point where academic assessment usually stops.
He also argued that the reward system decides which questions look worth asking. Work grounded in local conditions is often read as a case study of regional interest rather than a contribution to method, and that reading determines what gets cited and funded next. A validated ageing protocol for tropical deployment is a contribution to the field; a report that a known device behaves differently in Nigeria is not — and the difference lies largely in how the work was designed, which puts part of the remedy with African institutions themselves.
Answering the China question
When a breakout session met his call for local production of solar cells and batteries with the objection that Africa cannot compete with China, Professor Oguzie rejected the premise.
China, he noted, entered these industries on the bottom rung as an original equipment manufacturer of other people’s technologies before climbing to original design and then original brand manufacture. “It climbed not by importing turnkey factories but by accumulating engineering skill, cohort after cohort, until the design authority migrated to where the competence had settled. Design authority settles where the competence is.”
He offered Nigeria’s coal industry as the counter-example: mined at Enugu for half a century, supplying at its peak some seventy per cent of national commercial energy, without the technology of mining and processing ever being domesticated.
ACE-FUELS is instead targeting applications where African demand is unserved and specifications differ — clean cooking with integrated storage, off-grid and weak-grid storage, and vaccine and agricultural cold chains.
Two proposals
Professor Oguzie put two structural proposals to the symposium, both requiring no new funding: commonizing research and skills across batteries, solar cells, electrolytes and fuel cells, which share a common electrochemical skill base; and hosting studentships and postdoctoral positions at African centres rather than funding scholarships out of the continent.
“A scholarship that ends in emigration is a talent transfer, not a talent pathway,” he said, noting that no programme currently tracks retention of the researchers it trains. He served on the opening panel, “From research to policy, practice and talent/opportunity pathways,” alongside researchers from the University of Ghana, the University of Oxford, the University of Cape Town and Dalberg.
Professor Emeka E. Oguzie, FAS, is Professor of Electrochemistry and Materials Science at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, and founding Director of ACE-FUELS, an Africa Centre of Excellence hosted at the University, working on perovskite photovoltaics, sodium-ion battery materials, clean cooking and corrosion protection of renewable energy infrastructure. The Centre participates in REACH-PSM, an Ayrton-funded printable photovoltaics collaboration led by Swansea University, under which eleven ACE-FUELS researchers completed a knowledge exchange programme in July 2026. Professor Oguzie is Faraday Institution Battery Ambassador for Nigeria and has supervised more than forty doctoral researchers.
