Energy access grows, ‘gaps’ need plugging

Billion trapped in poverty

LONDON, April 3, (RTRS): Access to energy is necessary to meet people’s basic needs: to grow, distribute and cook food, to light homes, and to power machines and technologies.

It is also a key requirement for agriculture, commerce and industry and the provision of public services, such as education or health.

But more than one billion people, or one in seven, still lacked access to electricity in 2014 and many more suffer from poor supply, which keeps them trapped in poverty, experts say.

This week, governments, business, development agencies and others will meet in New York to work out how to reach three international goals by 2030: universal access to modern energy services, doubling the rate of improvement in energy efficiency, and doubling the share of renewables in the global energy mix.

Here are some facts about access to energy, based on 2014 figures when comprehensive data was last compiled :

Kyte

More than 95 percent of those living without electricity are in sub-Saharan Africa and developing countries in Asia, predominantly in rural areas.

Africa, excluding North Africa, has the largest percentage of people living without electricity at 37 percent overall and just 17 percent in rural areas.

South Sudan is the country with the lowest access rate in the world at five percent, followed by Burundi at seven, Chad at eight and Liberia at nine percent.

Urban areas across the world have close to universal access at 96 percent although challenges remain in the rapidly growing cities of Africa and in the Asia-Pacific region.

Progress in electrifying urban areas has outpaced that in rural areas where electrification rates have reached 73 percent.

Even regions with almost universal access to electricity, such as Latin America and the Caribbean, have countries that lag behind: in Haiti only 38 percent of people have access electricity.

Meanwhile, just over 1 billion people, or around one in seven, still have no access to electricity, a figure that has barely improved in two years, while the number cooking with health-harming fuels rose slightly to just over 3 billion, a report said on Monday.

Data showed progress in providing clean, modern energy to the poor was losing the race against population growth, especially in rural areas, the World Bank and the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a tracking report.

“If we are to make access to clean, affordable and reliable energy a reality, we’re going to have to drive the rate of progress up, and that is going to require political leadership,” said Rachel Kyte, CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, an initiative of the UN Secretary-General.

Reaching those targets is fundamental to achieving other global goals to end poverty and boost healthcare and education, as well as keeping global temperature rise below limits set in the Paris climate change accord, Kyte said.

“Every day we delay, or every day we don’t deliver, it becomes more painful and expensive, and we risk losing people and leaving people behind,” she told journalists by telephone. The three organisations behind the report said some countries — even among the poorest — are making rapid progress.

For example, Kenya, Malawi, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia increased electrification by two to three percentage points per year, while Rwanda topped that and Afghanistan and Cambodia made use of off-grid solar energy to expand access even faster.