If Beyoncé and Bill Nye The Science Guy had a baby it would be Jessica O. Matthews, according to her.

Matthews is the founder and CEO of Uncharted Power — the award-winning renewable power and sustainable company which is now well on its way to creating smart cities around the world.

She founded the company at the tender age of 22 and has been on a mission to create a world where there’s universal access to smart, sustainable infrastructure and where people have access to the same infrastructure that could allow them to live longer.

“I know I can’t cure death, but I can cure life,” said Matthews during the latest episode of the Black Tech Green Money podcast.

For her, the underlying mission stems from a personal experience of losing loved ones in her home of Nigeria due to the lack of basic physical systems needed to survive and thrive.

“The first step in innovation is the articulation of the problem,” she continued. “The way that you articulate that problem will then drive what you determine to be the solution.”

That solution for Matthews was determining what could inspire her family back in Nigeria to turn their obstacles into opportunities.

“My goal was to inspire,” said the CEO. “I asked myself, ‘how do I design solutions that inspire them to try?'”

From there, one of her first inventions came to life.

“That’s where the first energy-generated play products came from,” she said. “Taking the most popular sport in the world, soccer, and saying that I’ll bridge the gap between the passion and excitement behind playing the sport and bringing it across to creating energy and infrastructure.”

Not only does she continue to inspire her family, but Jessica is using her current platform to continue to encourage the next generation of innovators.

“I still very much believe that the problems of this world are entirely too large and complicated for one person or organization to solve,” she expressed. “We need as many people as possible believing that we can make a difference. For us, this meant developing a program called ‘Uplift’ with a curriculum called ‘Think Out Of Bounds.'”

The program teaches kids how to become social inventors, teaches them how to look at their surroundings as opportunities, not just obstacles.

Listen to the full episode of Black Tech Green Money featuring Jessica O. Matthews below:

Jessica O. Matthews

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