Jodie Wu

Chief Executive Officer, OffGridBox

2016 International Award Winner

Jodie Wu is the Chief Executive Officer at OffGridBox, a company that provides affordable clean water and renewable energy in remote areas. She is also a Co-Founder of Wpower_RDC, an African-led, woman-led team bringing products that enable reliable power in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Previously, she led Greenlight Planet in developing new products and services for underserved communities across Africa. Fluent in Swahili, an engineer by background, and an entrepreneur who dove straight into social enterprise at 22 years old, she brings unique expertise to the field of international development. She lived and worked in Arusha, Tanzania, for eight years, growing her staff to more than 80 Tanzanians to deliver life-improving solar lanterns, clean cookstoves, and agricultural tools to more than 100,000 families before joining Greenlight Planet’s global team. As a champion of collaboration, Wu has helped establish an innovation center in Arusha, advised dozens of fellow entrepreneurs entering the Tanzanian market, and consulted for various energy companies to bring in new services, including battery swapping, pay-as-you-go solar, microgrids, and clean cookstoves. Wu currently serves as an Advisory Council Member to the Global Distributors Collective (GDC). She was named one of America’s Most Promising Entrepreneurs by Bloomberg BusinessWeek in 2010 and was named to the Forbes “30 under 30” in 2011. She is also a 2010 Echoing Green fellow, 2011 TED Global fellow, 2012 Ashoka Emerging Innovator, and 2013 D-Lab Scale-Ups fellow. Wu holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.