Soraya Walli’s work in Rwanda includes gathering insights on decentralized energy solutions.
Connecting People to Power
With experience spanning microgrids, global climate initiatives, and energy financing, Soraya Walli ’22 MEM is working to bridge the gap between renewable energy infrastructure and economic development.
More than 200,000 people live in Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya, where power lines stretch above the camp and transmission towers are visible in the distance. Yet, like 600 million other people across Africa, the vast majority of Kakuma residents lack reliable access to electricity.
Soraya Walli ’22 MEM, a renewable energy expert from Mombasa, has been trying to change that. For her, providing sustainable, cost-effective, and reliable power is as much about people as infrastructure.
“Access is about how people consume power — whether a tailor can run a sewing machine, a farmer can irrigate reliably, or a clinic can store vaccines. Electricity only becomes meaningful when it expands people’s economic choices,” Walli says.
After earning a master’s in international relations, Walli began her career in San Francisco with a startup financing solar projects in Haiti. She later returned to Kenya to develop small-scale energy grids across the continent. Those experiences, she says, provided a whirlwind introduction to solar energy — from the challenge of securing long-term financing to the exciting possibilities of new technology, such as battery-powered microgrids. They also revealed to her how behavior, governance, and money shape energy access.
“It’s easier for people to continue business as normal, so even if they get electricity access, they’re not going to use it in the same way that someone who has always had access or has appliances would,” she says. “If we are only providing electricity for them to turn on a light, then how much impact are we really having? What have you changed in terms of how lives have been improved?”
These big questions inspired Walli to return to school.
Her time at YSE, she says, showed her there were no simple answers to her questions. It gave her the space, though, to engage with them from a social science perspective for the first time, helping her think about energy access in more human-centric ways.
“Access is about how people consume power — whether a tailor can run a sewing machine, a farmer can irrigate reliably, or a clinic can store vaccines. Electricity only becomes meaningful when it expands people’s economic choices.”
YSE also helped set her up for the next stage of her career with an internship at the Rockefeller Foundation, which evolved into a role with the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet. She participated in continent-wide initiatives, including helping to organize the inaugural Africa Climate Summit. There, she also grappled with the impacts of AI on energy distribution and dwindling funding as many countries pulled back from climate commitments.
Walli, who currently serves on the YSE Alumni Association Board, is now working with the Rockefeller Foundation on Mission 300, a joint initiative by the World Bank and African Development Bank Group to provide 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa with access to electricity by 2030.
She jokes that she has more questions than ever, but thanks in part to her time at Yale, she has the skills to begin answering them.
“I spent a lot of time at YSE considering how we think about impact in a behavioral way, which I never had the background to do before. I learned to think beyond megawatts installed and ask harder questions about impact, to see energy not just as a sector but as a foundation for development,” she says.
