Impactful COO Driving Operational Excellence, 2026
Rahab Kagwanja has spent more than two decades turning operations into the engine room of every organisation she has worked for. Today she serves as Chief Operations Officer at ATEC, a 100% dMRV carbon development company, where she leads the full journey of the IOT-enabled electric induction cooker from the factory floor to households in local communities in Africa and Asia. Her career, which now spans twenty-three years, has taken her through manufacturing, logistics, telecoms, renewable energy, and now in the carbon markets and climate sector.
Rahab Kagwanja | Chief Operations Officer | ATEC
Throughout her career, one belief has remained consistent: operations is not a support function but the core of any business. We, at The EliteX, are proud to have Rahab Kagwanja as Impactful COO Driving Operational Excellence, 2026.
Rahab began her career in 2003 in manufacturing, working in logistics at Del Monte. She later moved into the service industry, joining Acceler Global Logistics, an end to end supply chain service provider. That role gave her the chance to work with some of the biggest names in the Kenyan market like East African Breweries Limited to manage inbound logistics, and later to Safaricom, the largest telecom company in Kenya, first handling inbound logistics and then rising to become the distribution and customer service manager. These years gave her a broad grounding in how large, complex organisations move goods and serve customers at scale.
100% transparency, accuracy and traceability are what set us apart in the carbon markets.
It was her move into renewable energy that Rahab describes as the period where she created the most impact and felt the proudest of her work. At Greenlight Planet, now known as Sun King, she served as Head of Operations for Africa, helping to build operations both forward and reverse from the ground up in Kenya, Uganda, and across the wider continent. She then joined BioLite, another solar home systems company, where she again set up operations for Africa and managed the last mile distribution and reverse logistics of solar products. Her path later took her to M-Kopa Ltd, a fintech company that transitioned from paygo solar into manufacturing and distribution phones and e-bikes, transforming lives for people at the BoP where she led global retail and logistics for the group. Alongside these roles, she also supported several organisations as a consultant, sharing the operational expertise she had built over the years.
Today, at ATEC, Rahab leads operations as Chief Operations Officer, ensuring what she calls the engine of the organisation keeps running. Her role covers the entire value chain, from manufacturing to the final household that receives and uses the IOT-enabled electric induction cooker. In doing so, she and her team help decarbonise households at the bottom of the pyramid, turning avoided carbon emissions into credits that are reinvested into the business and given back to the communities as cashback.
Rahab holds a master’s degree in procurement and logistics, a qualification that lines up closely with the operational work she has done since the very start of her career. She explains that what first drew her to operations was the sense that this was where her skills could be put to the best use. Being able to build something from the ground up, and to mentor young people so they too can find their way into operations and create impact, has stayed important to her throughout her career.
She points out that without a strong operations function, no other part of a business, whether sales or finance can succeed. For her, operations is the function that makes sure a product exists, is delivered on time, in the right place, in the right quantity, and in the right condition.
More than anything, Rahab says it is the impact she sees at the household level that keeps her motivated. Having been raised in a remote part of Kenya, where electricity, shoes for school, and even regular meals were not guaranteed, she carries a personal connection to the communities her work now serves. Being able to use her hands and her expertise to bring real change back to households like the one she grew up in gives her a sense of purpose that has carried her through every stage of her career. She has worked across nearly every node of the value chain, including manufacturing, distribution requirement planning, inbound and outbound logistics, and retail, and she describes this breadth of experience as something she has come to love and enjoy rather than see it as just regular work.
We are not just making a product; we are making something that changes lives.
As Chief Operations Officer, Rahab’s responsibilities are wide-ranging and, in her own words, simple in description but complex in practice. She oversees the supply chain from the upstream planning stage, working to ensure that the number of stoves the company deploys in any market matches the carbon revenue targets set for that country. This includes manufacturing, pathfinding, and supporting carbon origination and implementation. Once products are manufactured to the highest standard, she oversees their distribution into every market where the company operates, which involves registering a local entity, identifying a national distributor and working closely with local last mile distribution partners. Her role also includes making sure that these partners deliver the right product to the right customers, so that the company can generate carbon credits of real, verifiable quality. ATEC’s products are fully digitally monitored for carbon reporting, and Rahab ensures that every unit remains visible to carbon buyers and verifiers at all times i.e., 100% trackable in real time to ensure the carbon credits generated are 100% auditable and verifiable.
Beyond distribution, Rahab also oversees the company’s household Cash-to-Earn (C2E) programme, which rewards real household usage. She ensures that this work matches what has been promised to investors, and that the company’s partners, especially in markets where the ATEC team itself is lean, are properly onboarded and supported. By outsourcing non-core activities to organisations for whom that work is their main business, ATEC is able to receive a higher standard of service than if it tried to manage every function internally.
When it comes to the operational challenges she faces, Rahab points to the unusual nature of the business itself. Unlike a typical company that earns revenue from selling a product, ATEC’s stoves are heavily subsidised, and the company’s real revenue comes from the carbon emissions avoided when households use them. In a market where carbon business is still not widely understood, and where many players rely on sampling or approximation rather than full monitoring, Rahab’s task is to maintain the highest quality and to ensure that every stove deployed is fully traceable and trackable. Helping people, including households themselves, understand why a subsidised product is given to one home and not another, while keeping full integrity on the ground while maintaining a very clean baseline, is another challenge she navigates regularly.
Efficiency, for Rahab, comes from choosing the right partners. She looks for organisations for whom a particular activity, such as last mile distribution, is their core business and lifeline, rather than a secondary task. This way, those partners deliver results at a level ATEC could not easily match on its own, without needing a large internal team or heavy investment in new systems. Technology plays an equally important role in the company’s approach. ATEC’s products are fully metered, making the company one of the few in the carbon market able to offer credits that are completely monitored, which Rahab sees as a key part of what sets the organisation apart. In 2026, ATEC became the first cookstove project developer to issue fully digitised carbon credits under Gold Standard using 100% digital monitoring, reporting and verification (dMRV), traceable on the Hedera Guardian public ledger.
Building and motivating strong teams is another area Rahab feels strongly about. She believes in giving her team autonomy and takes pride in helping people grow into the best version of themselves. This means understanding what excites each person, what they want to achieve in the short and long term, and supporting their development, including opportunities to learn about and move into other functions within the organisation. This approach aligns with ATEC’s core values of continuous improvement and one team, and it extends to encouraging team members to bring forward their own ideas for improving technology, systems, or ways of working.
When one person is winning, we are all winning, as a team and as a department.
Among the achievements Rahab is most proud of is the deployment of a data and KYC collection tool that scores users on the ground before a stove is deployed to them. Because ATEC’s success depends not on how many units are sold but on how well customers actually use them and move away from biomass fuels, this scoring system has helped the company identify good users more effectively. In one of its key markets, the system has helped bring more than half of the company’s user portfolio into the good user category, an achievement she credits to the dedication of her team.
To keep her team aligned with business goals, Rahab relies on a structured system of objectives and key results-OKRs, cascading from company-wide goals down through departments and into individual scorecards. These are reviewed in weekly check-in, giving her and her team the chance to spot where support is needed well before the end of a quarter. She believes this weekly rhythm of accountability, where everyone can see how the organisation is performing against its goals, is what allows the team to succeed together rather than being caught off guard at quarter end.
For professionals who hope to become COOs in the years ahead, Rahab’s advice centres on leading by example. She shares her own scorecard with her team, so they understand that when she does not meet a goal, it affects them as well, and that the whole department wins or loses together. She takes pride in developing her people and encouraging her own managers to do the same for their teams, so that no one is left working in isolation and everyone moves the organisation forward together.
Looking to the future, Rahab’s vision for both operations and her organisation centres on accuracy, transparency and transformative impact. She believes that helping households, especially women in the Global South, transition from harmful biomass cooking like charcoal and firewood to electric cooking will reduce indoor air pollution and conserve forests. She recalls visiting a refugee camp where a household told her that switching to ATEC’s induction electric cooker had not only saved them money on charcoal and fuel but had allowed them to afford three meals from only having two meals a day, meaning their children could go to school having eaten breakfast. For Rahab, that is what true transformative impact looks like. On the transparency side, she wants ATEC and similar organisations to continue offering 100% verifiable and auditable carbon credits to increase verifiers, buyers, and investors’ trust. In her opinion, this combination of accuracy, transparency and transformative impact is the future of carbon markets.
Being able to see that impact reach households in local communities in Asia and Africa is what keeps me going.
