INA WA Is Building a New Kind of Power Culture in Lagos

In conversation with Fortune Ibeh

Nigeria’s relationship with power has always been complicated. The World Bank’s latest Energy Progress Report puts the number of Nigerians without access to electricity at 86.8 million in 2023, the largest access deficit of any country and the third consecutive year Nigeria has topped that ranking. For those who are connected, reliability remains another part of the problem, with households and businesses often turning to generators and other alternatives when the grid fails.

In Lagos, where nights can move from dinner to drinks to a party and then somewhere else entirely, that anxiety around power has found a smaller, more personal version.

The moment your phone drops to 5% and you still have somewhere to go, your Bolt has not arrived, someone is calling, someone else wants your number, you have photos to take, people to find and a way home to arrange and suddenly, a small battery icon popping up on your screen becomes the most important thing in the room.

It is against that backdrop that INA WA, a young Lagos company, has chosen to work on a much smaller problem: the phone in your pocket.

Its power-bank rental stations have appeared at weddings, festivals, beach days, parties and corporate events, giving guests portable power without the familiar search for a socket. But there is a bigger idea behind the charging stations. INA WA sees the service as an entry point into a much wider relationship with energy, starting with something as simple as making sure a dying battery does not end the night.

The name itself carries that idea.“INA WA means ‘bring the light’,” in conversation with LSTV World Wide. The phrase, Adenijo Bello, Co-Founder, INA WA, explained, is rooted in a feeling familiar to Nigerians: the excitement that moves through a neighbourhood when electricity finally returns.

“We want to ensure that you always have that feeling wherever you go.”

For INA WA, a phone running out of battery creates a version of the same anxiety as a power outage. “It’s like comparing the light going off to the battery going low on your phone,” Bello explained. “It’s basically the same feeling.”

That connection between the name and the service also creates an unexpected opening for conversation. People often encounter INA WA without immediately knowing what it is or how it works. The name itself is enough to make them stop.

“What is INA WA? What happens if somebody doesn’t return the power bank? How do I pay? How do I know when to return it?” Bello noted.Those questions have become part of the brand’s story. What initially sounds like curiosity around an unfamiliar name becomes an introduction to the service, and, according to INA WA, those interactions have helped keep the business moving beyond the immediate need it was created to solve.

The younger crowd was always an obvious audience. Clubs, parties and festivals were natural territory. But one of the moments that stayed with the team came from a very different customer.

At INA WA’s first wedding after-party, a woman in her seventies walked up to one of the charging stations carrying an old mobile phone. It was neither an iPhone nor an Android device. She needed the older micro charger, something the team had not expected to see someone ask for.

The team helped her rent a power bank using an email address and watched as she connected the phone.

“Just watching the process of her plugging in the phone and seeing the smile on her face, like, ‘Ah, it’s my cellphone,’ it was so cool,” Bello recalled.

The moment challenged the assumption that the business belonged only to young people moving through Lagos nightlife. What INA WA was really providing was not simply a way to charge a phone, but a way to remain connected.

That distinction becomes important in a city where so much of everyday life now runs through the device in your hand. Your phone is your camera, your map, your wallet, your social feed, your contact list and, sometimes, the only way to get home.

So when the battery dies, you do not just lose access to Instagram or WhatsApp. You can lose access to the practical and social infrastructure around you.

INA WA discovered another version of that dependence at an early event, where the oldest person in the crowd was about 24. The team expected guests to rent power banks when their batteries were running low. Instead, some people wanted to keep their phones at 100% for the entire night.

“They weren’t paying to charge their phone for 30 minutes. They wanted to charge their phone the whole night. They were paying for two hours straight, three hours straight,” Bello said.

He found it amusing at first, but there was something revealing in the behaviour.

“These guys saw INA WA as a means to stay alive,” Bello observed. “Their lifeline was directly connected to the phone.”

For a generation whose social lives, movements and communication are heavily tied to their phones, the description is not as dramatic as it first sounds. A dead phone can mean a missed call, a lost contact, a failed ride request or leaving an event earlier than planned.

INA WA says it has seen exactly that happen. Guests with low batteries have started preparing to leave because they could no longer request a Bolt or wait for one to arrive. On some occasions, the company has simply opened its power banks to people who needed an emergency charge.

“If your battery is at 1%, I don’t want them to leave. Let them charge their phone to 15%,” Bello emphasized.

For the company, those moments have become part of what it believes the service should mean. The business may charge for its rentals, but the team does not see every interaction through the lens of a transaction.

“Giving back to society has never and will never cost us anything,” Bello reiterated.

For now, the business goes where people are. Its stations remain mobile, moving between parties, weddings, festivals and corporate events whenever the company is called in. But INA WA wants that to change.

The company hopes to begin deploying its stations permanently before December 2026, placing them in clubs and venues that regularly host people. Instead of waiting for an event organiser to bring INA WA in, guests could simply know that the service is already there.

“If you have events one, two, three, four, five days of the week, we’re deploying permanently so it’s no longer, ‘We need INA WA here.’ It’s already there and ready for everyone that needs us,” Bello explained.

It is a small change in distribution, but a significant one in the company’s larger ambition. The goal is to make access to power feel less like something you have to remember to look for and more like something that is simply available.

And that ambition extends far beyond phones.INA WA says it is registered as an energy business and wants to eventually become part of the wider push towards reliable, renewable energy in Nigeria. The company sees the power-bank service as an early step towards a future where its customers can use INA WA for much more than keeping a phone alive.

“We want to be a part of that change,” INA WA said of Nigeria’s energy challenges. “We want to be able to bring reliable, renewable energy across the board.”

Its longer-term vision follows its users as they grow. Today, it may be a phone. Tomorrow, it could be a laptop, a car, a home or an event centre.

“We don’t want it to be a brand that, okay, you’ve used today and tomorrow you no longer need,” INA WA explained. “As you grow, you’re no longer thinking about charging your phone. You’re thinking about charging your cars. You’re thinking about charging your laptops. You’re thinking about powering your houses, your event centres.”

It is an ambitious leap from a power bank rented at a Lagos party to a broader renewable-energy business. Whether INA WA can make that transition remains to be seen. For now, it is building the business one event, one station and one low battery at a time.

The company’s ambition is to make INA WA mean more than a charging service. It wants the name to become shorthand for energy itself, in the same way “Jacuzzi” has become a familiar name for a hot tub.

“That’s the point,” Bello confirmed.

Perhaps that is why the company’s story begins with something as ordinary as a dying phone, because in Lagos, staying powered is rarely just about electricity, it could be about staying long enough to take the picture, experiencing the peak of the night out, or long enough for the ride to arrive.

INA WA Is Building a New Kind of Power Culture in Lagos