A full 675 million people worldwide still lack access to
electricity, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a report published
Tuesday by several international organisations.
Despite significant efforts and some progress, the world
continues to face a dramatic energy access gap, according to the report by the
International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Renewable Energy Agency
(IRENA), the United Nations Statistics Division, the World Bank and the World
Health Organization.
The report cautioned that the world remained off track to
ensure clean and affordable energy access for all by 2030 — one of the
so-called Sustainable Development Goals set by all UN countries in 2015.
The world has seen “a recent slowdown in the global pace of
electrification,” World Bank vice president for infrastructure Guangzhe Chen
said in a joint statement.
While the number of people living without electricity has
been cut in half in the past decade, from 1.1 billion in 2010, 675 million
people were still doing without in 2021, the report said.
Around 80 percent of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, where
the electricity access deficit has remained basically unchanged since 2010, the
report said.
It highlighted progress elsewhere though, in particular the
increased rate of using renewables in the power sector, but warned this
progress was “insufficient” to reach the UN-set targets.
“While the clean energy transition is moving faster than
many think, there is still a great deal of work needed to deliver sustainable,
secure and affordable access to modern energy services for the billions of
people who live without it,” Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, said in the
statement.
Citing IRENA data, the report also cautioned that public
financial flows supporting clean energy in poorer countries had been decreasing
even before the Covid pandemic hit.
It also found that the current mounting debt levels and
rising energy prices were worsening the outlook for meeting the target of
ensuring universal access to clean cooking methods and electricity within the
next seven years.
Current projections show that without scaling up efforts
further, the world is on track to see 1.9 billion people still living without
access to clean cooking methods and 660 million without electricity access in
2030.
That would be bad news for global health.
According to the WHO, 3.2 million people die each year from
illness caused by the use of polluting fuels and technologies.
“We must protect the next generation by acting now,” WHO
chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in the statement.
“Clean cooking technologies in homes and reliable
electricity in health-care facilities can play a crucial role in protecting the
health of our most vulnerable populations.”
