Thirty thousand deaths a year. That is the figure Biodun Ogunleye, Lagos State Commissioner for Energy and Mineral Resources, put to carbon monoxide fatalities in the state in 2025. For Deborah Fadeyi, the crisis was never just a statistic. In 1999, she lost a friend to generator fumes, and the memory never left her. "We still hear in the news that people are dying from carbon monoxide poisoning," she told TechCabal. "Generators were so normal growing up that nobody really questioned what it meant for people to depend on them for something so fundamental as electricity, until it began to kill them."
Her first attempt at building an alternative came in 2019, through a venture called YettyFlames. Fadeyi was fabricating solar-generator systems locally, learning directly from Nigerian households and small businesses what they actually needed. The systems were rough, she has admitted, but they put her face to face with the customers she wanted to serve, and that grounding would shape everything that followed.
By 2020, she had shaped that work into a formal company. Vectar Energy, registered and operating in the United Kingdom, launched its first product: the Vectar Eco, a portable solar power station built specifically to replace the small petrol generators Nigerians call "I better pass my neighbour" generators. The idea was clear enough. Making it commercially viable was a different matter entirely.
Vectar Energy has since moved well beyond hardware. Its core product today is ecoWise, a platform that pools small solar projects into a single portfolio so they can access carbon markets that would otherwise be out of reach for projects of that size. What started as a response to one woman's grief has quietly grown into climate finance infrastructure, and the question now is how far that infrastructure can reach.
Originally published by TechCabal.