In 2022, global access to electricity declined for the first time in a decade, according to a report published on June 12th by the International Energy Agency (IEA), in collaboration with Irena, the United Nations Statistics Division, and the World Health Organization.
Tracking SDG7 – The Energy Progress Report 2024 (June 2024, 179 pages)
10 Million More People Without Electricity
In 2022, the population without access to electricity worldwide increased, reaching nearly 685 million people by the end of the year (about 10 million more people than at the end of 2021).
Numerous factors contributed to this unfortunate observation, according to the IEA: the global energy crisis, of course, but also “inflation, the growing debt burden of many low-income countries, and increased geopolitical tensions.” However, the Agency highlights some promising signs “in the deployment of decentralized energy solutions, largely based on renewable energies, particularly in rural areas where eight out of ten people without access to electricity live today.”
It’s worth noting that nearly 53 million additional people “gained” access to electricity between 2021 and 2022. At the same time, however, the world population increased by 63 million people.
The 7th of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals Moves Further Away
The world is thus not on track to achieve one of the UN’s major goals: as a reminder, the United Nations has set 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the 2030 Agenda.
The 7th of these 17 goals aims to ensure, by 2030, “access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all,” to “substantially increase” the share of renewable energies in the global energy mix by increasing international cooperation in this area, and to “double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency.”
The share of the world’s population with access to electricity was around 91% in 2022 (compared to 78% in 2000 and 84% in 2010). According to the current trend, this share could rise to 92% by 2030, leaving nearly 660 million without access to electricity by that time.
4 out of 5 People Without Electricity Live in Sub-Saharan Africa
Of the 685 million people living without access to electricity at the end of 2022, about 570 million lived in sub-Saharan Africa (about 83% of the world total).
This region is home to 18 of the 20 countries with the lowest access to electricity in the world. At the top are Nigeria (86 million people without access to electricity in 2022), the Democratic Republic of Congo (78 million), and Ethiopia (55 million).
The new IEA report also mentions that nearly 2.1 billion people still relied on harmful cooking systems based on charcoal, dung, wood, or agricultural waste in 2022, almost as many as the previous year.