Community
Jeremiah Thoronka
Jeremiah Thoronka is an award-winning innovator, entrepreneur, and scholar advancing clean energy and climate justice. A Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 honoree and recipient of the Commonwealth Youth Award (Africa) and the inaugural Global Student Prize laureate, he was also listed among the 100 Most Influential Africans. He invented Optim, a device that harvests kinetic energy from traffic and footsteps, and built a GSM/Bluetooth smart system to manage household power use.
Jeremiah’s recent work spans mini-solar grids and a framework to unlock the social value of energy access by upskilling local communities. A 2023 Mandela Washington Fellow (Leadership in Business, University of Nevada, Reno) who researched energy access at Arizona State University, he is now pursuing a PhD in Social Innovation and Sustainability, examining sociocultural dynamics of energy transitions and innovation diffusion. He remains committed to equitable, scalable solutions aligned with the SDGs.
“Being part of this community sharpens my craft and widens the circle of people it serves. I’m hopeful because regenerative materials, inclusive policies, and Indigenous knowledge are moving from the margins to the center. If we keep centring equity, humility and imagination, our built and natural environments can shift from extractive to restorative.”