Light has always been the defining daily uncertainty of Nigerian life. You plan around it. You budget for it. You argue about it. And when it goes, you check the estate WhatsApp group to find out whether it is just your street, the whole estate, or the entire area that is affected.

Joshua Usifoh looked at that ritual and asked a simple question: why has nobody built a proper system for this?

The answer is NEPAWatch, a platform that tracks power outages across all 36 states and all 11 electricity distribution companies (DISCOs) in real time, using crowd-sourced reports verified by AI. It has been live for less than two months. Almost a thousand people are already using it across every state in the country. Not one of them was acquired through paid advertising.

How It Works

Nigerians report outages through the app: light don go, light don come. NEPAWatch's AI runs a density-clustering algorithm across incoming reports to verify them. If enough people across the same area are reporting at the same time, the system flags it as a confirmed outage rather than a single bad data point.

That verified data feeds into a command center dashboard built for the DISCOs. Instead of waiting for phone calls and field reports, a distribution company can now see a live map of where outages are happening, how many customers are affected, and where to dispatch engineers first.

The consumer side includes street-level outage reports, free email alerts the moment power changes in your area, AI-powered predictions based on historical patterns and NERC band data, and the ability to save multiple locations (home, work, school) and track them all separately.

It is genuinely useful. The kind of thing you search for on the app store and are surprised nobody built properly yet.

Under Two Months. Three Signals That Matter.

Traction at this stage of a startup is usually manufactured. NEPAWatch's early signals are not.

ITMO UNILAG sponsored the project on Day 2, before most startups have finished debugging their landing page. The team pitched at the Innovation Marketplace in front of Vice President Kashim Shettima's delegation at Nigeria's first AI UniPod launch. UNDP personally invited NEPAWatch to represent Nigeria's entire energy sector at their AI Barriers Clinic.

Almost a thousand users across all 36 states, zero ad spend, under two months. That is an organic growth rate that most funded startups cannot replicate with a budget.

The Business Behind the App

NEPAWatch is not a civic project looking for a grant. Usifoh has structured it with three revenue layers.

The consumer app runs on a gamified model. A community leaderboard rewards the most active reporters with a Champion badge, keeping the data supply healthy and the user base engaged without the company paying for every data point it receives.

The second layer is a smart home IoT kit for energy security, targeting households and businesses that want automated monitoring rather than manual reporting.

The third, and most commercially significant, is the SaaS command center for DISCOs. Distribution companies lose billing revenue every time there is an outage they are slow to detect and recover. A tool that shows them exactly where the problem is, verified in real time, and helps them dispatch engineers faster has a direct line to their bottom line. NEPAWatch is already in active conversations with Ikeja Electric.

The long-term vision is to become what Usifoh calls "the digital backbone of Africa's power distribution network." The infrastructure problem is the same across Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and a dozen other markets. The framing is not overreach.

Why This Matters

The power problem in Nigeria is not a lack of generation capacity. It is a visibility problem. Nobody has real-time data on where the grid is failing, which feeders are down, and how long any given area has been out. NEPAWatch is building that data layer from the ground up, using the most available resource on the continent: people with smartphones who are tired of sitting in the dark.

Almost a thousand users across all 36 states, no acquisition spend, under two months live. The demand was already there. The product just needed to exist.

Usifoh is currently raising a pre-seed round. You can try the platform at nepawatch.app. It is free, and if you are in Nigeria, there is a reasonable chance it already has data on your area.