Serah Lois Wawira and Lydia Bernard-Jones

Serah Lois Wawira and Lydia Bernard-Jones are the product and behavioral leads behind UpEnergy Group’s electric cooking portfolio, a program that has reached over 100,000 households across Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. With UpEnergy, a carbon project developer that strives for just climate transition, Serah and Lydia’s work plays a critical role in supporting the disadvantaged communities most affected by climate change.

Serah owns product strategy, unit economics and commercial scaling across all five markets. She designs cooking products that drive sustained use and measurable fuel displacement, partners directly with carbon and MRV teams to align product design with methodology requirements, and sits on UpEnergy’s Innovation Committee, representing the product function in evaluating new revenue streams. Beyond UpEnergy, she has been volunteer program director of Red(P) since 2019, an education nonprofit serving 686 students across rural Kenya. Her career bridges enterprise technology, multi-country logistics scale-up and clean fuel delivery.

Lydia owns the behavioral research and customer experience architecture that underpins the program’s carbon methodology. She designs and leads RCTs, ethnographic studies and A/B tests across five markets to measure and drive sustained fuel displacement. Her research established that electric cooking displaces 70–80% of daily charcoal events per household, and her five-pillar CXP framework has reduced post-onboarding charcoal fallback. Previously at Impact Water, she led behavior change programming across 65,000+ schools.

Together, they loop between product design, customer behavior and carbon revenue, which are levers that determine whether modern energy cooking actually scales in African households.