Akon launched Akon Lighting Africa in 2014. The initiative has provided solar-powered electricity to eighteen African countries, reaching an estimated 600 million people who previously had none. He funded the early stages himself, from the money he made singing “Smack That” and “Lonely” and producing tracks for everyone from Eminem to Lady Gaga.
The shift from pop star to energy infrastructure isn’t as dissonant as it sounds. Aliaume Damala Badara Akon Thiam grew up between Senegal and New Jersey. His childhood in Kaolack, Senegal, was defined by the absence of electricity — studying by kerosene lamp, the sun dictating the daily schedule, darkness arriving with a finality that American kids never experience. He carried that darkness into a music career that generated $80 million, and then he took the money back to the darkness.
The Prediction
Talk to Akon and the music would come up briefly and the energy would take over. He sees the African continent the way a venture capitalist sees a market — except he means it differently. He sees 1.4 billion people, the youngest median population on earth, and a resource gap that isn’t an obstacle but an opportunity to leapfrog. Africa doesn’t need to build the power grid that America built. It can skip coal, skip gas, skip the infrastructure that took the West a century and cost the planet its atmosphere, and go straight to solar.
He describes it with the conviction of someone who’s been laughed at before and turned out to be right. The music industry laughed at him in 2004 — a Senegalese-American with an Auto-Tuned voice and a questionable backstory singing about being lonely. He sold 35 million records. He produced the track that launched Lady Gaga’s career. He learned that being underestimated is an advantage if you know what you’re building.
What He’d Want You to See Now
He’d extend the argument. Solar isn’t just energy. It’s education — kids who can study after dark. It’s commerce — businesses that can operate after sunset. It’s healthcare — clinics that can refrigerate vaccines. Each solar installation is a multiplier. He sees the math the way he heard the beat: as something obvious that everyone else is missing because they’re looking at Africa through the wrong lens.
The loneliness in the music wasn’t all performance. He’d tell you about the years between Senegal and success, the feeling of carrying two worlds that didn’t know each other existed. The electricity project is the bridge between them — the thing that lets the kid who studied by kerosene lamp send power to the next kid doing the same thing.
He’s building Akon City — a $6 billion planned city in Senegal, designed as a hub for African tech and trade, powered by solar energy and operating on a cryptocurrency called Akoin. The project has been criticized as unrealistic. He’s heard that before. About the music, about the electricity initiative, about every idea he’s had that started with “what if Africa didn’t need to follow the development path the West took?”
The criticism doesn’t stop him because the criticism comes from people who’ve never lived without electricity and can’t imagine that the absence of infrastructure is also the absence of the constraints that come with it. He sees a continent that can build from scratch. The people who see a continent that can’t catch up are looking through the wrong lens. He’d tell you this with the patience of someone who’s been explaining the same vision for a decade and expects to be explaining it for another.
He made pop music and used the money to electrify a continent. The transition from “Lonely” to solar infrastructure makes perfect sense if you grew up in the dark.