Akon Launches Solar Academy That Will Supply Electricity to 600,000,000 People in Africa

R&B artist Akon is behind a push to light up homes and streets across Africa with solar power.
Akon Lighting Africa is setting up a ‘Solar Academy’ in Mali so people can learn skills around installing and maintaining solar-powered electricity systems and micro grids.
The academy will have assistance from European solar technicians and experts to supply training programs, equipment and guidance, PV Magazine has reported.

The ALA website says the group has already completed projects in 11 African countries, which provides sustainable energy and local jobs.
The endeavour was launched in 2014 to accelerate the electrification of Africa by installing off-grid solar solutions suited to home and collective use, like street lights.
Senegalese-American artist Akon, famous for songs including “Locked Up” and “Smack That”, started Akon Lighting Africa (ALA) with cofounders Samba Bathily and Thione Niang.
Akon says he lived in Senegal for part of his childhood without any electricity, like many children in Africa.

"I was one of those kids you see running around with no shoes on living in straw huts," Akon told the National Journal last year.
The most recent World Energy Outlook report from the International Energy Agency says two-thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa live without electricity.

The ALA initiative was recently mentioned at the close of the ‘Sustainable Energy For All’ forum last month, where cofounders explained the idea for the charity – supplying pre-financed solar kits for homes and communities that would be repaid later.
Bringing solar power to homes could benefit people's health, as African homes that do not have electricity often burn kerosene for light.

The World Health Organisation lists kerosene as a toxin and research suggests burning kerosene has negative effects on air quality.
Kerosene is also a contributor to climate change.
The business model of funding small-scale off-grid solar solutions is being used already.
Website and solar financing business SunFunder allows people to ‘invest’ directly in solar projects.
The funding is made available to people who install solar panels and sell solar lamps in African countries, India and other developing nations.
The invested money is returned to investors in full, which they can either withdraw or reinvest in other projects.

The first project was fully repaid to investors in May 2013.
Today, 24 out of 34 projects have been fully repaid.
Currently, the SunFunder website is raising $US31,000 to provide funding for African retailers to sell more than 3000 solar lamps to communities in Zimbabwe.

Beyonce Saw a YouTube Video of This African Group and Flew Them from Africa to Work With Her

Beyonce and the Tofo Tofo Boys

Ever heard the saying

It’s better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.

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No better place to say this than this instance that happened by mere  chance. The odds are mind-boggling. Beyonce saw a video on YouTube of boys dancing in Mozambique.

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In case you don’t know where that country is, Mozambique is in the Southern part of Africa, sharing borders with South Africa, Malawi, tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Beyonce saw a video on YouTube of this dance group from Mozambique called Tofo Tofo Boys, she thought their dance was just right for her new video. She asked choreographers to learn the dance and teach others, but no one seemed to master it well.

They tried and failed until Beyonce decided to get the guys to come over and teach her dancers their now famous dance. There was a problem though, no one knew how to contact them.  Eventually after 4 months the group was found. The rest is history the guys helped and featured on the video for the song. (Who run the world, GIRLS).

Video showing Beyonce’s journey working on  (Who run the world, GIRLS).

 

The lessons to be learnt

If you or you know someone in Africa with a talent but cant seem to find prospects. Do the following.
Keep working on your talent
Do a small video and upload it on YouTube, you will never know who comes across it, you might even make some money in the process from your video.
If all fails keep trying.

Chude Jideonwo narrates experience working for Buhari’s campaign and why yesterday made him cry

This morning, my team member, Oluwatobi Soyombo and I sat in the office, and discharged our final responsibility to the Buhari Campaign Organisation – we changed the bio of the Muhammadu Buhari account across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and everywhere else to ‘President of Nigeria’.

I asked Tobi for the privilege to do this myself, with my own hands. Then, as he looked at me, shocked, the tears began to follow. After sending out the tweet for the new president of Nigeria (personal tweets from him are signed –MB), I took to my own private account and shared: ‘@MBuhari better not disappoint us. This is too important. This is too important’.

My team and I were offered the job to handle the communication for the Buhari campaign in November 2014. I couldn’t believe it. We had never been close to the All Progressives Congress; I had never even met Buhari. Even the ‘closer’ Tinubu, I have not met since that time in 2002 when I served him tea as a production assistant at the Nigerian Television Authority.
I had a few weeks before declined a meet to discuss youth communication for the Goodluck Jonathan campaignbecause I no longer had any faith in his leadership, but I was almost certain he was going to win anyway.

In May 2014, I had arrived Abuja to speak at a #BringBackOurGirls event. But I had hardly left the airport, when someone high up in the government called me: “If I see you up on that stage with Oby (Ezekwesili), you are finished in this country.”
So, I wondered, was it wise to finally set up enmity with the government for the next four years by working directly for its opposition?

All through the time my co-founder, Adebola Williams worked hard with the team of Uche Nnaji (OUCH) and Kelechi Amadi-Obi to shoot the photographs that redefined Buhari’s image, all through the period the team was assembled from Tobi to Alex Yangs to Kathleen Ndongmo, I couldn’t move. I was transfixed in fear, in hope that dared not speak. Could Nigerians actually unseat a seating President from the People’s Democratic Party?

I wondered if the rage I felt was worth the sacrifice I was about to make – putting my life, my relationships and my business on the line in a country where the biggest advise our richest man has given entepreneurs is ‘never fight with the government of the day’?

All of that is history now. What looked like a mirage then has become reality. The job became a mission. After four months of the most emotional campaign in my lifetime, sleepless nights at the StateCraft Inc headquarters, from the campaign office in Abuja, supervising the setting up of billboards, fighting TV stations that didn’t want to air our ‘Is This Transformation?’ promos, Adebola following the candidate around the country, and rewriting speeches in the dead of the night because the candidate knew exactly what he wanted to say, we are here now. Nigerians have unseated a 16-year monopoly.

So, this morning, I shared a story on my Instagram pagethat I haven’t spoken about in public before.
In 2013, six of us friends including Adebola Williams, ‘Yemi Adamolekun, ‘Gbenga Sesan and Kola Oyeneyin came together and decided that, beyond mobilising citizens, leading protests and using the media to drive conversation, Nigeria needed our passionate, sustained prayers. A year before, after our active involvement with #OccupyNigeria, and the events after, we were beyond disillusioned.
And so, every Saturday morning, we went from the houses and offices of one to the other and we would cry, and we would scream, and we would pray for country. Ah, we prayed. Nigeria’s future looked so bleak. It looked so dark, didn’t see any logical pathway to change. So we went to God with our hearts, we went to him with our disappointment; we went to him with our pain. We asked him, “What should we do? How should we do it?”

One day, as we prayed, in an office on the Lagos Island, I was so overwhelmed with despair I fell down on the floor and began to speak in frenzied tongues, tears streaming from my face, banging furiously on the cabinet in front me. My heart was desperate; just desperate for something to give way.

I didn’t know my friend, Kola, had the gift to interprete tongues. But then he began to interpret what I was saying. And it frightened me, because he was absolutely right. He captured the fears in my heart, and the requests I was making. He said, paraphrased, ‘God says He will change Nigeria. It looks like it won’t happen, but He will do a new thing and it will spring forth. We won’t understand how He will do it, but He will.”
Two years later, God has kept his promise.

I do not know what the future holds. I cannot even say with certainty that this new dispensation will fulfil the promises it made to us when it called us on board and to you when it asked you to vote.
But I know one thing: I spent the past four years giving the Jonathan government the benefit of the doubt, willing it to succeed. Yet each time it failed, I was on the street, passionately denouncing it. And when, finally, after the Chibok girls went missing, I lost hope in it, I put everything on the line to join Nigerians in punishing it.
Things have changed.

I have invested faith that Buhari will be different, not just because he is a new president today, but because I have been priviledged to sit in the same space with him, I have listened very carefully to his wisdom and his depth. I have counted the cost and I have overwhelmed faith that he is the leader we need.

But we, and he thankfully, know this: he cannot play with our future. He cannot play with the future of our children.

We have cried for this nation, because it has failed us too many times. We have worked our fingers to the bones, and our ‘bloods’ have boiled because we believe in its potential. Therefore, our tempers will be short, our forgiveness will be costly, our reactions to real and perceived failures will be swift.
Our hearts are broken, our spirits burdened. We desperately need the promised change, and we need it to start immediately.
Nigeria has suffered enough.

– Chude Jideonwo is managing partner of Red Media Africa. One of its companies, StateCraft Inc, was official communication agency to the Buhari Presidential Campaign

Must Read: The Segun Odegbami piece for Buhari that everybody is talking about

I have a little story to tell. It may provide a little insight into one of the most daunting challenges that will confront the new government of Muhammadu Buhari, President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Even as I narrate it, I am not so sure what lessons we can draw from it.
I will narrate it nevertheless. It started almost four years ago when I visited Maiduguri, the city most afflicted by the Boko Haram insurgency.
The crisis is fueled by an army of youths in an area of Nigeria that has a large number of the estimated 16 million (or more) out-of-school children in the country that may harbour the highest concentration of illiterates in the world, plus an ocean of unemployed, unemployable and unskilled youths, who see nothing beyond the bleak future that lies ahead of them. That’s why joining an insurgency that promises temporary relief becomes a viable and attractive option!

I met with the governor of the State, Kashim Shettima, and in a few brief minutes told him about the sports academy in a little village in Wasimi, Ogun State, and my idea about how the school may alleviate the poor situation of a few of the youths of Borno State, who were unable to return to school as a result of the insurgency.

He listened with rapt attention. I told him we could use the passion of the youths for sports (football in particular) to convince some of the those with talent in football to enroll into schools outside the troubled state, to keep them in the schools, to give them some education that they essentially need, provide a full dose of their youthful passion and fulfill their dream one day of playing professional football and becoming famous and successful like Tijani Babangida and Jay Jay Okocha.
Governor Shettima immediately took up my offer to send a few Borno students that were temporarily not going to school to Wasimi in South-West Nigeria, an experiment that would be the first of its kind in the history of the state and, indeed, Nigeria.

The International (Sports) Academy is a non-profit NGO, a secondary school for children gifted or interested in sport, but who might have difficulty with their academics but seek opportunities to pursue their football dream.

The Academy does not discourage any of its students from choosing to play professional football, it only ensures that they do so after acquiring a basic secondary education, an absolute necessity for every Nigerian child that wants to avoid the pitfalls associated with illiteracy and the almost certain difficult life after sports!

The insurgency in the North East of Nigeria provided a perfect backdrop for my experiment.
Governor Shettima persuaded me to admit five students from the State. The motivation for the lucky students for the programme was the opportunity of high-level football training, plus exposure to competition and international scouts. The academy promised all of that plus an education and a get-away from the theatre of the orgy of killings in Maiduguri!

Within a few months the State ministry of education conducted a selection process and sent the five students to the sports ‘laboratory’ in the heart of Yoruba-land, a bold experiment of the impact of such exposure of youths at such a young age to such cultural orientation.

The students arrived the academy at the start of the 2012/2013 academic session. They were supposed to have just completed their Junior Secondary School so, they were all enrolled into SS1.
One week into the session the school’s principal drew my attention to a shocking discovery. The students, brilliant with their football ability, were far behind the other students in their academic capacity.

Indeed, two of them could neither read nor write. Their communication was limited to a few words in broken English. The difference in the standards of education between that part of the country and the South was clearly apparent.

Obviously, the Borno students had thought they were coming to a typical football academy that would open up for them the opportunity for a possible place in professional football in Europe. Academics were not emphasized to them. They discovered that only after they arrived the academy and found that they had to engage in the academics, obviously a new journey that will test their will and spirit to the limit.

Recall that two of the students could not speak any English and so could not follow the teachings in class. The other three were a little bit better as they could communicate a little and had an understanding of what was being taught them. We had very few options what to do. What we knew we would not do was to send them back to the hell in Maiduguri. We had to make the best of what was a very challenging situation. Let me cut a long story short. This is the third year into our experiment. It has been very fruitful for the students and enriching for the academy.

We dropped the two students with the most problem from the SS1 class, as they could not cope. We created a new classroom for them with two specialist teachers in English and Mathematics. With the help of the National Mathematics Centre in Abuja we set up a centre in the school specially for the teaching of mathematics. The centre now supports not just the two students but also the entire school.
The academy also set up an English language centre for the accelerated teaching of English language for those with learning difficulty!

So, for the past two and a half years the two students that could not cope with the SS1 class work because of their initial lack of communication skills have been studying English and Mathematics. In the past year they have included a vocational course in photography into their curriculum.
The other three students have caught up with the rest of the class and are ready to enroll into a university! They are presently sitting for their WAEC examinations.
The ‘miracle’ is that none of the five students is now eager to go to Europe anymore to pursue a football career at the expense of their education.

Indeed, the two students training in professional photography returned from the last holiday break with a new and exciting proposal – they want to return in September 2015, spend one extra year and attempt to sit for WAEC! That’s how ‘hungry’ they have all now become for education without diminishing their interest or even their chances in professional football. They have both passed their proficiency ‘tests’ in English language and can now communicate well and effectively. They are now very comfortable with their numeracy. How quickly they can catch up in the other subjects in the next year to enable them sit for WAEC is now our exciting new challenge!

The work the academy has done with the Borno State children will make an interesting case study for the Federal Ministry of Education. A British educational curriculum design consultant has already been in Nigeria examining the methodology and curriculum that have transformed these students from where they once were to where they now are.

They have become the ambassadors of a unique aspect of the work of the academy. Their peers in Maiduguri who have been trapped in the warp of the Boko Haram insurgency for the past three years would envy them not just for their new academic achievements but also for their proficiency, their new found confidence, their very improved football skills and their very bright prospects for a good life into the future!

– This Best Outside Opinion was written by Segun Odegbami/Guardian