Resilience - The Most Valuable Asset in the Industry

Ask anyone who has built something in emobility what has got them through, and the answer is almost never technical.

Almost every meaningful advance in emobility has come from someone who continued when the conditions around them suggested they should stop. Charging networks exist because people built them before the vehicles arrived. Local manufacturing exists because founders backed themselves in markets with no supply chain to inherit - and many of those founders were women who were told the numbers didn't work, the timing was wrong, and the sector wasn't theirs to enter. Whole categories of clean transport exist because somebody looked at a set of conditions everyone else had written off and saw something workable in them. That capacity to keep going is the most undervalued asset we have.

That is worth celebrating. It is also worth understanding properly, which is why we have chosen it as our theme for the month at Women Leading EV.

The women producing the most consequential work in this sector are not succeeding at the same thing, but rather, in their own ways, shaped by the particular conditions of their market. This demonstrates that resilience is a set of competencies, not a trait randomly possessed, meaning we can study, teach, share and build our experiences into an organization on purpose.

What follows is a short tour of four markets, four sets of conditions, and four remarkable responses.

The market with no rulebook

Where? Much of early-stage African emobility

The problem? Not poor policy, but the absence of it. No vehicle category for the product you have built, no import classification, no financing instrument, and no official whose remit covers you.

Shantha Bloemen founded Mobility for Africa in Zimbabwe in 2018, developing the Hamba: a solar-charged electric tricycle built for unpaved roads, capable of carrying up to 450kg, and leased to rural women on instalment terms. She has described the early years as isolating, noting that nobody was discussing emobility in Africa at the time, let alone emobility designed for rural women.

The regulatory vacuum eventually caught up with the business. Zimbabwe still regulates road traffic under Rhodesian-era legislation, which draws no distinction between a petrol motorcycle and a 25km/h electric tricycle. From early 2025, police began impounding Hambas and demanding motorcycle licenses, a package costing close to $500 a year.

What resilience is required here? Product risk and market risk are things a founder can plan for; being penalized by a law drafted before the technology existed is not. It asks you to keep operating, keep leasing, keep serving the women who now depend on the vehicle - while spending your energy arguing that your product is what you say it is, to people with the power to seize it.

The market that changes its mind

Where? The United States and the United Kingdom

The Problem? Highly developed policy architecture that reverses direction within months, taking investor confidence with it. In the US, consumer EV credits ended for vehicles acquired after 30 September 2025. The charger credits expired on 30 June 2026. NEVI disbursements were frozen. US EV sales fell 4% in 2025.

Kameale C. Terry grew up in South Central Los Angeles and spent three years at a charging network operator, where she identified a problem, nobody was addressing: most non-functioning chargers were not broken electrically. The faults were firmware, communications and vandalism, and there were no trained technicians to resolve them, so assets sat idle for weeks. In 2020 she co-founded ChargerHelp! with Evette Ellis to train and dispatch that workforce.

The wider market supports the point. Despite the credits ending and NEVI stalling, the US installed over 18,000 DC fast-charging ports in 2025, an increase of 30% on the previous year, funded largely by private capital.

The UK is running the same experiment with different instruments. The ZEV Mandate requires 33% of new car sales to be electric in 2026, rising to 38% in 2027, 52% in 2028 and 80% by 2030. Flexibilities were introduced in 2025 after manufacturer lobbying. In June 2026, reports indicated the government was preparing to weaken it a third time, potentially cutting the 2030 target from 80% to somewhere between 50% and 70%.

The consequences fall hardest on the businesses that moved first. Charge point operators spent £587 million on infrastructure in 2025 alone, deliberately building ahead of demand and ahead of profitability, on the strength of a policy commitment. Analysis by LCP Delta for ChargeUK found that further weakening could halve charging investment over five years — a reduction of up to £2 billion in capital expenditure — while a stable mandate would support growth from 12,000 direct jobs today to 35,700 by 2035. Separate analysis by BEAMA put the cost to the Treasury at a minimum of £2.9 billion in foregone VAT.

Two women have been the most audible voices holding that line. Vicky Read, recently Chief Executive of ChargeUK, argued publicly that weakening the mandate a third time would slam the brakes on infrastructure rollout and damage Britain's reputation as a market worth investing in - pointing out that her members committed billions before reaching profitability precisely because they were told the policy would hold. Yselkla Farmer, Chief Executive of BEAMA, made the same case from the manufacturing supply chain, with the observation that you do not attract investment by moving the goalposts.

What resilience is required here? Two things at once. Building a business model that survives without the incentive, and simultaneously fighting to keep the incentive - because the people who moved first are always the ones most exposed when the rules change, and nobody else will make the argument on their behalf.

The practical question for any business is which revenue line survives if the incentive disappears, and whether you are asking it early enough to act on the answer.

The market where the fundamentals fail

Where? South Africa

The Problem? For most of the past decade the objection was neither cost nor range. It was the difficulty of justifying an electric fleet in a country where the electricity supply was interrupted on a published schedule.

Ndia Magadagela grew up in a village in Venda, qualified as a chartered accountant, and spent six years in industrial dealmaking at the Industrial Development Corporation before co-founding Everlectric in 2019. The company provides electric vehicles as a service, combining vehicles, charging infrastructure and finance in a single lease. An initial focus on the taxi industry did not gain traction, and the business pivoted to logistics; it now operates the electric vans behind Woolworths deliveries. Magadagela has spoken candidly about having to establish her credibility twice over in funding discussions, and has said that the best investment she made was starting the business at what felt like the worst possible moment.

Larissa Venter at Zero Carbon Charge has taken a parallel approach to infrastructure, building charging sites that are fully off-grid on solar and battery storage, while stating plainly that the sector's current economics do not support entering EV charging for the revenue.

The market then changed underneath both of them. Eskom's generation recovery plan succeeded, and on 16 May 2026 South Africa completed a full year without a single second of loadshedding, the first time since 2018.

That did not render blackout-proof businesses redundant. The constraint moved rather than disappearing: tariffs are now rising by more than 18% cumulatively across two years. The question shifted from whether power is available to whether it is affordable, and operators who built for self-generation are insulated from the new problem as a consequence of the old one.

What resilience is required here? To design for the constraint rather than waiting for it to lift. Waiting leaves you with nothing once conditions improve. Designing leaves you with an asset

The market that loses its nerve

Where? Europe

The problem? Nothing failed. The policy framework holds. The grid functions. Investors stopped believing the projections.

Northvolt was intended as Europe's response to Asian battery dominance, raising over $14bn on a commitment to produce the world's greenest battery. Its flagship facility targeted 16 GWh and reached approximately 1. BMW cancelled a contract worth around $2bn. Bankruptcy followed in March 2025, leaving a Swedish workforce of roughly 5,000 in uncertainty. Across the continent, some 700 GWh of announced gigafactory capacity was withdrawn within eighteen months.

Ilka von Dalwigk now leads RECHARGE, Europe's battery value chain association. Her role involves sustaining a credible industrial case at the precise moment the evidence appears weakest, without overstating it. Keynoting in Stuttgart in June, she warned that Europe is walking open-eyed into new dependencies, citing IEA figures showing China accounted for over 80% of global battery cell production in 2025.

What resilience is required here? Holding two positions simultaneously and being believed on both. That the situation is worse than the sector admitted, and that it remains worth pursuing. In a downturn, unqualified optimism becomes useless and unqualified realism becomes corrosive. The scarce capability is maintaining both.

Why this theme, and why now?

The encouraging conclusion from all four stories is that resilience is transferable. It is institutional work, structural design, engineering judgement and narrative discipline, and every one of those can be learned, documented and built into a team deliberately rather than discovered under pressure.

That reframing matters particularly for women in this sector, because it moves resilience from something individuals are commended for possessing to something organizations can take responsibility for developing. Women currently represent under 20% of the African emobility workforce, and 7.6% of Europe's 500 largest companies had a female chief executive in Fortune's 2025 ranking. Those numbers are moving in the right direction, and the programs that are moving the dial are worth naming: Roam's Women in EV initiative in Kenya, Ampersand training women e-moto drivers in Rwanda, BAIC South Africa's 30% female target, Zembo's solar kiosks in Uganda, MAX.ng's women-only networks in Nigeria, and SolarTaxi's female engineering academy in Ghana.

So, this is our month: four sets of conditions and four learnable competencies, namely institutional, structural, design and narrative. Most organizations have developed one well. The opportunity in front of all of us is to develop the other three before we need them.