Saw a friend posted a photo claiming Akon had provided solar power to 600 million Africans, but the media was not going to tell you about it. It also questioned what is it the NGOs are doing.
This was an amazing claim, so I went looking into it. “Akon solar power” led me to his company Akon Lighting Africa. The key figures on the home page look much more modest with 100K street lamps, 1,200 micro-grids, and 102K domestic kits. The initial claim was that there were 600M without access to electricity. It does not look like it has put a dent in that number, much less the goal of 80 million people. The company was founded in 2014.
In 2015 they claimed to have provided solar power to about 8 million people (using the average household size of 8.7 people in Senegal rounded down; used average household size for Senegal as that is where Akon is from and started).
Bringing Electricity to 1 million households in Africa watch the video#AkonLightingAfrica https://t.co/DfVp6z97wb
— Akon Lighting Africa (@AkonLighting) May 19, 2015
As of 2016, they claimed to have helped 1.5M lives.
1.5 million lives in Africa have already been positively affected by @AkonLighting #LightToLearn
— Akon Lighting Africa (@AkonLighting) October 20, 2016
Source: Twitter search for “from:AkonLighting million”
Hopefully 1 million households in the first one should have been lives to make it consistent. Otherwise, in 2016 there was a huge backslide.
Let’s unpack the current numbers on the website.
- 102K domestic kits =Â 887.4K lives
- It is not clear what the micro-grid means, but the website has photos of charging stations attached to a set of solar cells. That could mean about 600K additional people counted not with power in their home, but able to visit a charging station to charge up a device to bring home.
- My interpretation of micro-grid would be a network of homes connected to a grid. It would also power the street lamps.
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