So Africa, as a continent has obviously not been the most fortunate of all the 54 countries that exist here today, none were dealt a favorable hand from either a historical or a geographic perspective after being conquered by Europeans, having their borders all arbitrarily drawn up and then occupied for generations.

Most of Africa's modern countries became independent throughout the 19 fifties, sixties and seventies.

And ever since then some have fared better than others, specifically when it comes to access to one of the most critical resources of modern civilization.

Electricity.

There is a stark contrast between the arab states of North Africa where access to electricity is nearly universal and the dozens of countries beneath them in sub Saharan Africa, where electricity is significantly more spotty.

Some countries deep in the continental interior like chad the Central African Republic, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have less than 10% of their populations with electricity access.

But of all the countries within sub Saharan Africa, there are five who currently stand out as having significantly more access to electricity than any of the others.

With at least 85% of their populations being hooked up.

South Africa, s Bottini kenya gabon and the highlight of this video Ghana, There are many interesting reasons as to how each of them managed to pull this off that almost always have involved some kind of sacrifice or compromise, but none are as wild as Ghana who in order to do so sacrificed more than 3.5% of her total land area where more than 80,000 people once lived by flooding it and in so doing, also created humanity's largest artificially made lake.

Allow me to explain the british showed up in the 19th century and basically carved out a colony with Ghana's rough modern boundaries that they called at the time the Gold Coast because they were primarily interested in using it as a trading post for gold.

Coming in from the west african interior naturally as with all african colonies, the british created these artificial borders across a multitude of people with a multitude of languages, religious faiths and ethnic identities.

Then, after more than a century of british colonial rule in what became known as Ghana eventually achieved independence in 1957 and was led by this man, Kwame Nkrumah who set out as chief goals as president as abolishing Ghanian poverty, ignorance and disease and despite the various disadvantages and nerves that Ghana had immediately upon independence after centuries of colonialism, they did have a few advantages that many other sub Saharan african countries did not.

First of all, they had a nice long coastline that could provide direct access to the gulf of guinea and the world ocean, enabling them free access to conduct international maritime trade.

Second Ghana is rich in a wide variety of natural resources but was specifically blessed by an abundance of box site, a sedimentary rock that contains a relatively high amount of aluminum and as a result is the world's primary source of aluminum, one of the world's most important metals used in nearly everything from aircraft to automobiles, to cars, computers and dozens of other things.

If Ghana could develop its aluminum production capability, then it could kickstart the young country's economic growth towards the future President Nkrumah and the Ghanian government knew all of this of course.

But the problem was the refining box site into a workable aluminum is a very energy intensive process and Ghana lacked the electricity infrastructure that was required to power a smelter that could turn bauxite into aluminum at a truly industrial scale.

But luckily Ghana had another geographic advantage that their new and ambitious government could turn towards the Volta River beginning within landlocked Burkina faso, the many tributaries of the Volta all converge in Central Ghana before emptying out into the gulf of guinea and recognizing the potential of the river for hydroelectric power.

A scheme began being worked out for the construction of a hydroelectric dam.

But the Volta River is huge and so in order to actually dammit the dam itself was going to have to be enormous and that meant that it was going to cost a lot of money.

And as a freshly independent former colonial country, Ghana was pretty short on cash and so with an estimated price tag of $258 million in 19 sixties money, Ghana managed to secure investments from the World Bank, the United States in the United Kingdom to get the project rolling off the ground and then from there, the plan was relatively straightforward by the town of Akosombo on the river's banks, A massive concrete dam 660 m long and 114 m high would be built to hold back the waters of the Volta for context.

That is more than three times as wide as the hoover dam in the U.

S.

State of Nevada.

At the same time, an aluminum smelter and processing facility would be constructed in the nearby town of TEM.

A.

That would be powered by the electricity generated from the dam.

Now, in order for all of this to work, they needed to flood a portion of the Volta river basin behind the dam in order to create a big reservoir of water that they could use to flood through the dam to generate the electricity.

The reservoir they ended up creating here became Lake Volta, the largest man made lake in history, with a surface area of just over 8500 square kilometers, which equated to about 3.6% of the entire territory of Ghana going underwater.

For the sake of comparison, the lake is about twice the size of the U.

S.

State of Rhode island.

And we're the lower 48 US States.

To make a similar sacrifice of 3.6% of their total land, it would be like plunging the entirety of Nevada beneath a sea of water.

after the dam was finished in the land sacrificed.

And now provides 1000 and 38 megawatts of electric power, which is not only enough to power Ghana's entire aluminum industry, but almost all of Ghana's entire domestic electricity demand as well.

The dam produces so much power for Ghana that they now export a lot of the energy into neighboring countries to like Togo and Benin, who themselves now received the majority of their own electricity needs from the Volta Dam in Ghana as well.

And now, with around 85% of the population having access to electricity, Ghana has the highest rate of electricity access in West africa and one of the highest rates on the entire continent.

But none of this came very easy because there were other sacrifices and penalties that Ghana had to pay for this incredible level of success.

Besides for flooding, 3.6% of her land.

For one thing, there were around 80,000 people who used to live in that 3.6% of land that eventually got flooded, which was around 1% of Ghana's entire population at the time, they all had to be evacuated and displaced prior to the flooding often through force.

And it didn't really go all that well.

These 80,000 people lost their primary sources of income from fishing and agriculture.

They lost their homes, lost their communities and they've always struggled ever since.

And then there's the fact that most Ghanians didn't even reap any benefits from the dam either.

Despite the fact that Ghana was obligated to pay for 50% of the dam's construction themselves.

The terms for the foreign investment they received, covering the remaining 50% of the construction costs, only gave the Ghanian government the rights to just 20% of the dam's total electricity output, while the remaining 80% was strictly allocated for the aluminum plant in Te MMA, which was at the time privately owned by an american company, which led to widespread accusations of neocolonialism being practiced in Ghana.

In the years since though, the american owned company was nationalized by the Ghanian government and the aluminum production there has declined and now the vast majority of the dam's additional electric capacity is used to power Ghana's own growing domestic demand as well as neighboring Togo and Benin.

The construction of the reservoir behind the dam has also forever disrupted the once rich agricultural productivity along the former river's banks.

What was once fertile land for growing crops surrounding the river is now flooded and submerged beneath the modern lake.

And then further downstream, the Volta from the dam, the soil has now completely lost its former fertility as well without the periodic floods that were once the norm before the dam was built.

As with every major decision in life, there are always tradeoffs and opportunity costs to consider in the case of Ghana and the Akosombo dam.

There unfortunately isn't ever a free lunch especially for former colonial e occupied countries and time will tell if the decision they made to flood 3.5% of their land in exchange for the highest rate of electricity in West Africa was worth it now after watching all of that.

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