Hi my name is Radhina and I am the Director of Marketing at Jaza Energy. I am responsible for branding, and marketing solar powered batteries for homes in rural communities.

I used to be a pop star as a teenager in Tanzania. I was in a girl group called The Unique Sisters. We won many awards and gained national and International recognition. The music group , believe it or not, was a result of me and my sisters being bored and trying to make friends after moving from a smaller city in Dodoma, to a bigger city in Dar es Salaam,(both are cities in Tanzania by the way).

In an effort to make friends we ended up making Music history and gaining fans instead of just making friends, specifically in Tanzania and Japan( …we will get into details about my connection with Japan on the next blog). Through music we made history, creating the path for other female musicians to come to the scene. We gave music a positive image, being 3 real sisters from the same family ,we took this as a serious job and we were able to manage ourselves. We wrote our own songs, came up with our own stage choreography and came up with our own original melodies in a time where most were sampling western music like hip-hop and R&B. We came up with our own music video concepts and were the inspiration behind a whole music genre called Bongo Flava. We were even able to get advertising contracts with popular Tanzanian brands like Azam ice-cream, because we created a brand for ourselves. All this I accomplished before I was 20. For more information on our contribution to the Bongo Flava music scene, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongo_Flava.

Through my music career I got to travel and I involved myself with many charities, community development and social development projects involving orphans, youth, women and HIV Aids. Through these projects I found my true calling, I really loved to work as a social entrepreneur, and since then I have in one way or another been actively investing my time energy and effort in this sector.

I moved on and cofounded an NGO called Envaya http://envaya.org and later became the director for a venture-backed startup called Telerivet http://telerivet.com. When Jeff Schnurr the CEO of Jaza Energy, the company I work with now, contacted me about a new solar energy company he was about to start I was immediately intrigued for 3 reasons.

First this company was in Pemba, a place I had never visited before even though I am Tanzanian. The second reason came after visiting Pemba and seeing the very first hub. These hubs would run remotely, we’d go into the community train 2 community members to run the hub and the community would be powered by Jaza. I found this to be a great way for us to empower communities. The third reason for joining Jaza was because it was different from anything I had done in my life, and I like different. This job felt like a huge adventure to me. The feeling of being away from the big city, driving around on an island and instantly changing people’s lives for the better, it felt a lot like the happy ending caused by the hero/heroine in movies and I wanted to have that feeling everyday — it was a movie where I was the heroine that saves the day. I would be solving a real problem and this made me want to work with Jaza.

With this I saw an opportunity to really revolutionise branding and marketing for rural communities. As technology takes over our lives, rural communities are able to function with very minimal technology so when marketing a product I have had to go back to the basic. I started to talk to more people and do more face to face marketing…more human contact was involved and I loved it. Things we can touch and feel like posters and flyers and just all round great customer experience and a smile is what makes or breaks a brand in the rural community. No hiding behind technology. This job has changed how I look at marketing and branding. This blog will document some of the lessons learned and interesting things that happen through my work ; my contribution in “saving the world” will be documented here on the blog so don’t miss it. How can you miss seeing the world through the eyes of a pop star turned super brand specialist and social entrepreneur?