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

[applegrove]

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

by Lauren C. Williams at Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/07/10/3678613/akons-ambitious-plan-bring-electricity-africa-solar-energy/

"SNIP..............


It’s “a no-brainer.”

That’s how hip-hop and R&B artist and producer Akon described using solar energy to bring power to hundreds of millions of Africans.

The Missouri-born Senegalese American had just trekked to Mali from an inaugural meeting in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) with top West African leaders to talk about renewable energy solutions.

“Africa needs to be sustainable for a long time and be a crutch for the rest of world instead of the other way around,” Akon told ThinkProgress in a phone interview. “A stable Africa helps the world.”

Akon joined five prime ministers representing Benin, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, and Togo who gathered in the Ivory Coast’s economic capital of Abidjan for the West African Energy Leaders Group — a conference for business and political leaders working to develop strategies to address the region’s energy crisis.


...............SNIP"

[Liberal_in_LA]

1. k&r

[Liberal_in_LA]

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.”

[meow2u3]

4. There's no shortage of sun in Africa

especially around the equator. Solar energy is ideal for African countries like Senegal, Mali, the Ivory Coast, etc.

[Catherine Vincent]

3. Kick!!

Making the world a better place.

[NickB79]

5. One problem: 1.3 billion people isn't sustainable for a long time, no matter how many solar panels

“Africa needs to be sustainable for a long time and be a crutch for the rest of world instead of the other way around,” Akon told ThinkProgress in a phone interview. “A stable Africa helps the world.”

When you reach that kind of population, energy supply is just one of a myriad of resources you have to massively increase. Food, fuel, arable land, timber, raw minerals, etc, all have to greatly expand to meet the needs of a booming middle class.

Long-term, the only way the human population can be sustainable is by reducing our numbers globally.

[applegrove]

6. The only way to reduce the population to a sustainable level is to increase the middle class. Then

woman have 1.7 children. Everywhere in the world this is what happens. In every developing nation birth rates go way down once people can make enough to save and invest in each child. Electricity will increase opportunity in rural areas. It will increase the middle class. It is the only way to go if you care about the world on a number of levels.

[NickB79]

7. Except increasing the middle class drives more consumption of resources

Just look at what's happening in China and India today, as their fertility rates fall yet their resource needs boom.

Increasing the middle class to reduce global populations MIGHT have worked if we weren't already about 4 billion people past the planet's carrying capacity, and staring into the abyss of global catastrophe known as climate change.

[applegrove]

8. So north Americans have had their kick at the middle class can

so we should all become poor subsistence farmers and live and die off of $2 a day? If this doesn't work for you and your family why would you put that on people in Africa? Also, much of china's pollution and resource use is going to build junk for Americans and others to use. For sure science and technology will and have stepped up to fix sustainability issues.

[whatthehey]

9. That's a neat trick. Africa's population is only 1.1 billion

And I'm pretty sure the big modern cities there have at least some electricity

[bettyellen]

10. The correct stat is 60 million without electricity. And huge parts of major cities have families

Doing without it as well. Nice PR pics though!