Yana Esterleyn: Empowering Communities in Africa and Beyond

Electricity is more than energy; it is the spark of human progress. It lights schools and hospitals, connects communities to opportunity, and transforms villages into thriving hubs of life. Yet across vast regions of the world, millions still live without it, their nights unlit, their potential unseen.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, where access to electricity in many countries remains below 25 percent, the challenge is not only technical but deeply human. Without power, healthcare falters, education ends at dusk, and entrepreneurship remains a dream waiting for dawn.

Yana Esterleyn, founder and CEO of Sustany Global, and her team have pioneered programs that deliver power where national grids cannot reach, integrating solar energy systems tailored to the land and its people. Her vision bridges innovation and empathy, uniting renewable energy, digital connectivity, and inclusive development into one purpose: to empower lives.
Under Esterleyn’s leadership, many of these initiatives thrive through bold public–private partnerships, where governments, investors, and communities work together to turn sunlight into progress and infrastructure into opportunity.
The imbalance we confront today is stark: Africa holds nearly 60% of the world’s solar resources, yet contributes only 1% of global solar capacity. Through Sustany, Yana Esterleyn and her team came together with a shared purpose: to redefine that equation and close that gap, not through charity, but through sustainable, inclusive investment that fuels growth, ownership, and resilience.

Yana also tackles the next frontier: digital inclusion. With internet penetration in Africa still around 38%, she views connectivity as the new lifeblood of development. In her vision, every classroom should connect to global knowledge, every clinic to life-saving information, and every small business to the digital marketplace.
By aligning electrification with internet access, Yana Esterleyn and her team have built ecosystems of opportunity; where schools can teach after dark, clinics can refrigerate vaccines, farmers can monitor markets, and youth can access a world once out of reach. In this synthesis of light and data, technology becomes a bridge, not a divide.
In Latin America, Ms. Esterleyn is working alongside regional partners to accelerate the energy transition already underway. With roughly 65% of the region’s power already renewable, she contributes expertise that helps nations scale solar, create green jobs, and strengthen energy security.

In the United States, she operates within one of the world’s most advanced innovation ecosystems, linking vision with execution. Her work spans smart grids, advanced storage systems, and sustainable infrastructure, including the transformation of data centers into energy-conscious, climate-aligned facilities that embody the future of responsible growth.
What defines Sustany’s work is not where it operates, but its perspective and how it sees the world. Sustany bridges two worlds: the Global North and South, the developed and the emerging, the technical and the human. Insights from global innovation corridors find purpose in African villages and inspire new models beyond the borders. Yana Esterleyn’s work is guided by a simple conviction: electricity and information are not luxuries, they are rights. And through Sustany Global, she continues to prove that innovation, when driven by empathy and vision, can illuminate the world, giving light to possibility, and turning possibility into progress. For through that light, the light of people, across every horizon it touches, Sustany relentlessly continues Powering Progress for a Cooler Planet.
A world illuminated, not only by power, but by purpose.