Baafour Asiamah-Adjei ’03 is the founder and CEO of one of Ghana’s largest private power companies, Genser Energy—an entrepreneurial engineer who aims to deliver sustainable energy across West Africa. And he credits MIT with much of his success. But when he was applying to colleges, the Institute wasn’t even on his radar. The son of an encouraging primary school teacher in Tafo, Ghana, he’d earned a spot at the storied Achimota School and excelled. Still, he didn’t think he was smart enough for MIT. Asiamah-Adjei was accepted to Lehigh University, where he planned to major in engineering. But when he went to the US embassy in Accra for his mandatory meeting with Nancy Keteku, then the regional educational advising coordinator for West and Central Africa, the first thing she said was “You got a perfect score on your SAT. Why didn’t you apply to MIT?” “I didn’t believe I’d get in,” he says, “so I didn’t even try.” The admission deadline was two days away. Asiamah-Adjei finished the application in one. His father drove it to the airport and engaged the help of a flight attendant at Ghana Airways, who couriered it to New York and mailed it in time.The spark of purposeAsiamah-Adjei got into MIT and thrived. After earning his degree in mechanical engineering, he landed a demanding role at the global consulting firm McKinsey and worked on teams that optimized flight routes for FedEx, determined best practices for airline engine maintenance, and devised practical workflows for moving factories from one country to another.The job was intellectually challenging and fulfilling. But he felt something was missing in his life: purpose.In 2005, Asiamah-Adjei took a rare break to visit Pablo Tribin ’01, a friend since they’d bonded at an intense MIT $50K Global Startup Workshop in Australia. Tribin and his father, Hugo Tribin, SM ’63, had just established a power company, Genser (for “generation services”), in their home country of Colombia with a holding company in the US. As the friends floated in the pool at Tribin’s apartment building in Miami, Tribin asked Asiamah-Adjei if he had ever thought about working in the power industry.In 2005, only 41% of Ghana’s population had access to electricity. Much of that electricity was generated by the Akosombo and Kpong dams on the Volta River, but relying on hydroelectric power made Ghana susceptible to climate fluctuations that affect water levels. Recalling how much his MIT thermodynamics class (then called Heat and Mass Transfer) with Ernest Cravalho had stayed with him, Asiamah-Adjei realized that perhaps delving into energy was not such a wild idea. “The seed had been sown,” he says. He took a year off from McKinsey to go to Ghana and explore. Baafour Asiamah-Adjei ’03 (right) reviews a section of Genser Energy’s natural gas pipeline network with construction superintendent Stephen Ayisi.BISMARK ADAMAFIO ARYEEThat year led him to realize that Ghana desperately needed a more robust power supply if it was going to industrialize and expand economic opportunity for its citizens. He also saw an opportunity to create infrastructure that reflected the values he believed in—systems built with precision, scaled with care, and grounded in the local context. If he could help build a power company that worked not only efficiently but ethically—by training Ghanaian engineers, choosing technologies that made long-term environmental sense, and reinvesting in the communities it served—then he could turn his skills into something larger than profit: He could invest in Ghana’s future.But first, he had to turn a profit.By 2007, he had founded Genser Power Ghana (a partner to Colombia’s Genser Power), a company committed to providing efficient and reliable power systems—fueled initially by natural gas and eventually by sustainable sources—throughout Ghana. He and Tribin, along with their fathers, led the board of directors. They also created a US holding company to support Genser’s expansion and attract private investment.It appeared that Asiamah-Adjei had found his purpose.The mission and values of the company now called Genser Energy are rooted in the two institutions that shaped its founder’s approach to business and to life. From MIT (which inspired a commitment to “be fact-based at all times”), Asiamah-Adjei gained not just an engineering education but also a way of dealing with the unknown—with humility, curiosity, and a willingness to experiment. MIT instilled in him the confidence to say “I don’t know” and the discipline to find out. “MIT teaches you that you actually don’t know enough yet,” he says. “You need to be doing research and finding out more.” At McKinsey, he learned how to turn inquiry into action—and to distinguish between facts and judgments. His time there also inspired the idea that Genser’s team should “maintain an obligation to disagree”—that is, to speak up when warranted. MIT roots and modular thinkingAsiamah-Adjei says that learning basic coding at MIT in 2.001 (Mechanics and Materials I) opened a whole new way of understanding how systems work. “One of the first things I learned in my sophomore year was that you can build computer software in modules and then let the modules talk to each other,” he says. “As a concept, that didn’t exist in my young brain until that class.” This idea of breaking down complex systems into interlocking components became the philosophical and physical backbone of Genser’s operation, inspiring both Asiamah-Adjei and Tribin to reimagine power-plant construction. Instead of building plants from scratch on site—often in remote areas—they develop replicable, factory-built sections and transport them to the site, where they are assembled like Lego structures. Genser worked with companies such as Caterpillar to reengineer their standard generator systems into modular skid-mounted units that are easier to scale and deploy. Asiamah-Adjei also collaborated with a team of US engineers to design other skid-mounted modules, such as gas-control units (which include such things as instrumentation, control systems, valves, and piping) that are fabricated in China. These modules can be stacked and adapted as needed to build 30-, 60-, or 120-megawatt power generation systems. This approach also makes it possible to offer smaller, incremental contracts in place of massive one-size-fits-all power deals, ultimately benefiting both Genser and the emerging economies it serves. The result is an energy infrastructure that’s less expensive and easier to scale. And that, he claims, is the fundamental difference between Genser and its competitors. Modularity allows Genser to build infrastructure at about a third of the typical cost. Genser launched its operations by supplying electricity directly to Ghana’s industrial sector. It started with the country’s gold mines after two Genser interns—Chen-rei Wan, SM ’07, PhD ’11, and Stephanie Dalquist ’02, MEng ’03, SM ’05—conducted a comprehensive review of all Ghanaian industries and determined that the mines’ high, consistent electricity demands, limited access to reliable power, and urgent operational needs made them highly motivated and well-resourced early adopters. “At that time, Pablo in Latin America was focused mainly on oil and gas and textile industries,” says Asiamah-Adjei. “But we took a very different turn.” Of the eight power plants it has built—seven in Ghana and one in Burkina Faso—three have powered gold mines exclusively and others have also supplied power to the grid and to Côte d’Ivoire. With five still operating under its control, Genser has the ability to generate over 200 megawatts of electricity and plays a leading role in supplying power to West African industry. In addition to helping Genser target its first customers, Dalquist also introduced Asiamah-Adjei to Frances Rogoz ’07, an economics major drawn to development work after taking a D-Lab class at MIT. Rogoz soon joined Genser as its first full-time hire and has been with the company ever since.Rogoz started when the company was operating out of an office fashioned from a shipping container. She helped shape Genser’s growth by developing financial models, advising on contracts, and playing a key role in leading major infrastructure projects—most notably a natural-gas pipeline across western Ghana that has become vital. Today she serves as VP of project development, leading a team of 10 and overseeing West African strategic initiatives. “The natural-gas pipeline has been super transformative for us,” she says. “It has allowed us to really invest in infrastructure not only that we can use, but that the whole country can use.” Genser is now Ghana’s largest owner of gas pipelines and its only private one, operating four that total 430 kilometers. Genser’s growth has not come without controversy. In 2022, a coalition of Ghanaian civil society organizations charged that the company was receiving preferential treatment on gas tariffs and bypassing regulatory procedures. Asiamah-Adjei says these claims were “misinformed,” and ultimately they were dismissed by the Ghanaian parliament after an intense, months-long investigation. He believes the attacks reflected public suspicion of private infrastructure development rather than distrust of Genser’s operations and says that, ironically, they solidified the company’s standing: “Prior to this, everybody thought our pipelines belong to the government, because nobody builds these things in Africa.” While transporting fossil fuels is never a clean process, Genser conducted environmental and social impact assessments to guide sustainable pipeline construction. The company also works to mitigate environmental harm with land restoration and biodiversity measures. It had planted 100,000 teak seedlings as of 2023 and plans to reach 1 million by 2028 as part of its commitment to environmental stewardship.Crossing borders, fueling growthGenser’s most ambitious project to date is a cross-border natural-gas pipeline stretching from Prestea, Ghana, to Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, with long-term plans to extend into Guinea. “We built the gas infrastructure to be able to take the gas to a less developed country, to displace diesel, and now we will backfill that with solar or wind,” says Asiamah-Adjei. Genser now finally has the capital to move forward on an original goal: investing in the infrastructure needed to produce renewable energy.In 2018 and 2019, Genser brought in two graduates of MIT’s Technology and Public Policy program—Elizabeth Murphy ’15, SM ’18, and Janet Yun, SM ’18—to help chart the pipeline’s course. Instead of opting for the most direct route, they studied regional development trends to anticipate industrial zones that might emerge over the next 25 years, and the company routed the pipeline accordingly. “Bottom line is that we brought on MIT people whenever we needed to solve our problems,” says Asiamah-Adjei. As part of his goal to help Ghana transition from diesel power to cleaner-burning fuel, he came up with the idea of building a gas-processing facility to handle roughly 30% to 40% of the country’s domestic gas supply, and he and Tribin designed it during the pandemic using “back of the envelope” calculations and lessons from MIT courses 2.005 and 2.006. Although Tribin divested from both Genser Energy and Genser Latin America and started Mechero Energy in 2015 to develop new strategies for transitioning to cleaner energy, he still works closely with Genser as a consultant. Educating engineers and the next generationFrom the beginning, Genser has invested in Ghanaian talent, partnering with Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) Africa on an elite professional development program that recruits and trains recent university graduates. “Half of my team basically came from the SEO program,” says Rogoz. The company rotates cohorts of interns through departments ranging from engineering to legal and finance, offering full-time positions to top performers. Genser also collaborates with Ghana’s Ministry of Energy to develop training pathways that align university curricula with industry needs. The goal, Asiamah-Adjei says, is simple: “Let us be a platform for training Ghanaians.” After starting Genser in Colombia, Pablo Tribin ’01 encouraged Asiamah-Adjei to found Genser Power Ghana in 2007.COURTESY OF PABLO TRIBINAsiamah-Adjei’s first full-time hire, Frances Rogoz ’07, is now VP of project development.COURTESY OF FRANCES ROGOZRogoz’s team alone includes five SEO graduates; many more now lead projects or departments across the company. “There’s a ton of human capital in Ghana,” she says. “It has just not been realized—and that’s really important for us to develop those people and bring them up within the company.” As Genser expands, Asiamah-Adjei is also thinking about the next generation. In Ghana, he is building “an MIT of a high school” focusing on STEAM, in memory of his late mother, Aforo Asiamah-Adjei—a boarding school for some 840 students in grades six through 12. More than half will come from lower-income families and receive a full scholarship through the foundation he established in his mother’s name to empower orphans and communities through education in STEM, sports, and the arts. “We find the smartest kids in the region,” he says, “and we put them through a rigorous program and [prepare them] to enter universities, global universities.” Construction is slated to begin this fall, with a planned opening date of September 2027. Whether developing infrastructure across West Africa or launching a school to cultivate future changemakers, Asiamah-Adjei is investing in systems that endure. And just as Genser began with a conversation between friends, it continues to be powered by relationships—between mentors and interns, engineers and economists, founders and funders. Each one is a link in an evolving network connecting energy, education, and economic development.