1.3 Billion Africans Don’t Have Electricity. Akon Has A Plan To Cut That In Half.

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2. more from the article

Those staggering figures prompted the certified platinum recording artist to launch the Akon Lighting Africa (ALA) initiative in 2014, which aims to bring solar power to nearly half — 600 million — of the Africans who live without power.

So far, ALA has provided solar street lamps, micro-generators, charging stations, and home kits to 14 countries — Benin, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea, Kenya, Namibia, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.
The lack of power “stopped us from doing the things we need to do,” he said. “There wasn’t enough electricity to pull from,” to get Africa on par with the rest of the world developmentally, and solar was “the biggest and quickest solution.”