Adekoyejo Kuye has the unhurried air of a man with nowhere else to be. He is the sort of person you can listen to for hours without noticing you have been sitting at the same table.
We meet on July 28 at Somerset Westview in Kilimani, Nairobi. Kuye is in town for Halcyon’s Africa Food & Climate Resilience programme, where his company is part of the 2026 cohort. He sits easily, speaks without hurry, and rarely seems to search for a thought.
Kuye is the founder of KAMIM Technologies, a Nigerian climate-tech company that builds solar-powered cold storage infrastructure and connects farmers to markets.
It is not the company Kuye imagined himself building. In fact, he never imagined building a company at all. The son of a chemical engineering professor and a nurse, Kuye grew up taking toys apart to understand how they worked and expected to become a mechanical engineer working on cars.
During his national youth service, he was posted to a rural community in Enugu State, Southeastern Nigeria, where he also worked unpaid for a solar company, carrying panels and batteries into communities, and began to understand the everyday problems farmers faced.
He later left for Germany for a master’s in renewable energy, financing his studies with factory jobs and night shifts at Amazon. When he finished, staying offered the safer, more obvious path. Friends and family urged him to take it.
Instead, Kuye bought a one-way ticket to Nigeria without telling anyone. “Are they using juju to pull you home?” he recalls someone asking.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.