A World in Transition: Progress and the Persistent Gaps in Universal Energy Access
20.11.2025
The global quest for universal energy access has entered a decisive new phase. Over the past two decades, extraordinary gains have transformed the lives of billions: since 2000, 1.6 billion people have gained access to electricity, and 2.2 billion have shifted away from traditional cooking methods that damage health, degrade forests, and trap households in cycles of poverty. These achievements, driven largely by ambitious national strategies in Asia and Latin America, demonstrate what is possible when political will, targeted policies and innovative business models converge.
Yet, beneath these milestones lies a sobering truth: progress is slowing, inequalities are widening, and the path to truly universal, affordable modern energy remains perilously narrow.
While Asia and Latin America now approach electrification rates of 98% and have halved the number of people without clean cooking in just fifteen years, sub-Saharan Africa faces a starkly different reality. The region is home to 80% of the world’s population without electricity and the vast majority lacking clean cooking solutions. Rapid population growth has outpaced electrification and clean cooking efforts, leaving more people without safe stoves today than a decade ago. Even the global number of people without electricity, after decades of continual decline, rose for the first time in 2022, underscoring the fragility of recent progress.
The combined shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic and the global energy crisis have strained budgets, raised financing costs, and pushed basic modern energy services further out of reach for the world’s poorest households. From 2010 to 2019, annual reductions in the number of people without electricity averaged 65 million; in 2024, the decrease was just 11 million. Clean cooking access has also slowed, slipping from 120 million people gaining access in 2019 to 100 million in 2023.
Yet amid these setbacks, transformative developments are taking shape. A new wave of policies and investment plans is emerging, particularly across sub-Saharan Africa, where seven in ten people lacking clean cooking now live in countries that have recently introduced targeted reforms including subsidies, tariff adjustments, results-based financing, and national clean cooking strategies. Private sector innovators are deploying pay-as-you-go solar systems, high-efficiency electric and LPG stoves, and locally manufactured biomass alternatives at unprecedented scale. Political momentum is growing as well: clean cooking featured prominently in recent G7 and G20 communiqués, and the 2024 Clean Cooking Declaration signaled a renewed collective commitment.
Electricity access is also benefiting from new policy frameworks. Roughly 60% of people still without power live in countries that introduced new access measures in 2024 and early 2025 including tax and consumer incentives, electrification programmes and national strategies. These domestic efforts are being reinforced by emerging international initiatives such as Mission 300 and South Africa’s G20-led agenda on universal access.
To chart a path forward, the IEA has introduced the Accelerating Clean Cooking and Electricity Services Scenario (ACCESS), which explores how countries could dramatically expand access by replicating the fastest rates of progress ever recorded. This scenario underscores a critical insight: universal access is achievable within a decade if governments, financiers and development partners align around proven, affordable solutions, and scale them at record speed.
The lessons are clear. Countries like India, Indonesia and China have shown that ambitious policies can rapidly close access gaps. The challenge now is extending that level of ambition to the regions most in need, where high debt burdens, costly capital and shrinking development budgets threaten to stall progress.
Today’s global energy access landscape reveals both the limits of incrementalism and the promise of determined action. Much like the broader climate negotiations, the story is one of uneven momentum: remarkable breakthroughs in some regions, persistent barriers in others, and a widening gap between what is happening and what is urgently required.
The next decade must be defined not by stalled progress, but by a global mobilisation to deliver clean, affordable energy to every household. The technologies exist. The policies are known. The examples are proven.
What remains is the resolve to act, at the scale and speed that human development, economic opportunity and climate justice demand.
Written by: Pia Lovengreen Alessi
To read the full version of the World Energy Outlook 2025 click HERE