Emelia Akumah

Emelia Akumah is the Founder and President of the Africa Energy Technology Centre (AETC), an organisation based in Accra that works to reposition Africa from a consumer of imported energy technologies to a producer, innovator and exporter of sustainable energy solutions, and she sits on its Advisory Board. She convenes the Africa Energy Technology Conference, which the Centre first held in partnership with Ghana’s Ministry of Energy at the Labadi Beach Hotel in March 2024. The conference has returned every year since, and its 2027 edition runs from 18 to 20 May 2027.

Akumah has more than ten years of corporate experience in the Middle East, North Africa and wider Africa, facilitating business-to-business partnerships, and has worked as a consultant for VAOB Group in Ghana and the United Kingdom. In 2018 she co-founded 1Sports, which aims to improve young Ghanaians’ lives through education, training, scholarships and sport; with Ghana’s Ministry of Education it launched the Exceed Project, which has reached more than a thousand girls in the Central Region. In 2020 she founded The Enough Network (TEN), a community platform for women. She led the Ghanaian delegation to Africa Energy Week in Cape Town in November 2021 and was the first West African speaker on the World Youth Forum’s INSPIRE.D platform in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

She studied at the London School of Business and Finance. From 2022 to 2024 she was the Equality in Energy Transitions Initiative’s ambassador for Ghana, mentoring early-career professionals and arguing that the under-representation of women in leadership and technical roles limits their part in the clean energy transition.

Her focus areas are local innovation and technology manufacturing, the integration of energy policy across Africa, investment in energy projects and the inclusion of women and young people in the sector. In July 2025 she held talks at the UAE Embassy in Accra on cooperation in energy technology. In July 2026 she led a Centre delegation to President John Dramani Mahama to present a Youth Energy, Entrepreneurship and Incubation Programme, an Africa Smart Energy Technology and Innovation Hub and a Ghana National Solar Prosumer Initiative to expand rooftop solar through net metering. At the 2026 conference she called AETC “a strategic engine designed to catalyse investment and harmonise energy policies” across Africa’s 54 nations.