NEWS

For the first time in decades, the number of people without access to electricity is set to increase in 2022.

One of the striking findings in this year’s World Energy Outlook (WEO) is that the combination of the Covid pandemic and the current energy crisis means that 70 million people who recently gained access to electricity will likely lose the ability to afford that access – and 100 million people may no longer be able to cook with clean fuels, returning to unhealthy and unsafe means of cooking. That is a global tragedy.

According to the latest IEA data, the number of people around the world who live without electricity is set to rise by nearly 20 million in 2022, reaching nearly 775 million, the first global increase since the IEA began tracking the numbers 20 years ago.

The rise is mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of people without access is nearly back to its 2013 peak.

Only half of the 113 countries without universal access to electricity have targets to increase access, and fewer than half of those aim to reach universal access by 2030. An even smaller number ... have comprehensive national electrification strategies in place. The achievement of national targets … is therefore not enough to achieve full universal access to electricity by 2030 (the aim of Sustainable Development Goal 7).

The gap between the Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG 7) target and current policy ambitions is even wider in the case of clean cooking fuels. Some 128 countries currently lack universal access to clean cooking, but only 39 of them have clean cooking targets, and fewer than half of these are targeting universal access by 2030.

Download the full report HERE