Akon Is Getting His Own City

By Syakir Roslan  •  14 Jan 2020 in News

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Rapper Akon recently announced that plans for his proposed city in Senegal, appropriately named ‘Akon City’, has been finalised with Senegalese government officials earlier yesterday.

The rapper was in Dakar, Senegal to finish up discussions before promptly tweeting this to the public:

Just finalized the agreement for AKON CITY in Senegal. Looking forward to hosting you there in the future pic.twitter.com/dsoYpmjnpf

— AKON (@Akon) January 13, 2020

The prolific artist turned philanthropist has come a long way since his days of making celebrated worldwide hits such as ‘Lonely’, ‘Smack That’, and the timeless club bopper ‘I Wanna Love You’. Akon made huge waves with his humanitarian efforts through co-founding the project ‘Akon Lighting Africa’ in 2014, alongside co-founders Samba Bathily and Thione Niang, in hopes of providing a sustainable energy source that would provide electricity throughout rural regions across Africa.

In this instance, they opted to go for solar energy due to the fact that Africa has an average of 320 days of sun a year. Since the inception of this project, Akon has been investing in solar panels that would generate energy able to power about 600 million people in rural African communities.

According to Lighting Africa’s website, “Our goal is to enable access to off-grid lighting and energy products for 250 million more people across sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, by catalyzing the market.”

With this information in mind, it’s no surprise that the Senegalese government would happily welcome Akon with open arms to establish a city in the village of Mbodeine. In an interview he made last December, Akon stated, “It’s a 10-year building block so we’re doing it in stages.” He added, “We started construction in March and stage two is going to be 2025.”

For now, we will have to wait patiently as construction plans carry out before we get a glimpse of the rapper-philanthropist’s new city.

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