Nairobi, July 9 -- When Jonas Barman, a 40-year-old Swedish engineer, first came to Kenya, the idea of starting a solar energy company was far from his mind. In fact, he was looking for a school roof on which to test an idea.

A master's student at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the time, he had chosen Kenya as the setting for his thesis on the reliability and affordability of photovoltaic (PV) solar systems in areas with weak or non-existent grid power.

This eventually led him to co-found a company called Miale Solar Inventions with a Kenyan investor. Since 2016, Miale has installed infrastructure capable of generating up to 7.7 megawatts of solar power (enough to power 7,000 homes). The company targets corp...