How Many People Live without Access to Electricity – 2026 Updated
Updated May 2026 | Originally published February 2020*
Humankind is in a perpetual state of development. The modern world has dramatically improved living conditions over the past two centuries, and access to electricity has become an assumed part of daily life for most people on earth. Yet in 2026, hundreds of millions of people still live without it — not as a minor statistical footnote, but as a daily reality that shapes every aspect of their health, education, economic opportunity, and safety.
The question of who lacks electricity, and why progress has slowed, is one of the defining development challenges of our time.
Where Things Stand in 2026
The headline figure has improved significantly since 2020, when roughly 840 million people lacked electricity access. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), approximately 730 million people worldwide still lacked access to electricity in 2024, and preliminary 2025 data suggest the number has nudged down only marginally since then.
That’s meaningful progress on paper: the world has connected hundreds of millions of people over the past decade. But the pace has slowed alarmingly. Between 2015 and 2019, the global unelectrified population shrank by an average of 80 million people per year, largely driven by massive connection programs in India and Indonesia, both of which have since achieved near-universal access. Since 2020, annual gains have averaged just 10–11 million — a fraction of what’s needed.
To put the challenge in stark terms: achieving universal electricity access by 2030 (the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 7 target) would require connecting approximately 135 million new people every year between now and then. The current pace is roughly one-tenth of that.
The Sub-Saharan Africa Problem
If there is one region that defines the global electricity access crisis in 2026, it is sub-Saharan Africa. Around 80% of the world’s unelectrified population lives here — approximately 597 million people. The numbers are particularly stark in individual countries:
- Democratic Republic of Congo: ~78% of the population lacks electricity
- Niger: ~80% without access
- Chad: ~89% without access
- South Sudan: ~93% without access
- Malawi, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, and the Central African Republic: all above 80% without access
What makes this situation especially complex is that in many of these countries, population growth is outpacing the rate of new connections. The DRC, for example, is one of the fastest-growing countries in the world. Even when new power lines are built, the proportion of people with access can stagnate or decline simply because so many new people are born into areas without any grid infrastructure at all.
The rural-urban divide is also stark. According to World Bank data, about 82% of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa had electricity access in 2023, compared to just 33% in rural areas — a gap that reflects both the economics of grid extension and the geographic isolation of many communities.
What’s Causing the Slowdown?
The deceleration in progress since 2020 isn’t accidental. Several overlapping crises have hit the most vulnerable regions simultaneously:
The COVID-19 hangover. The pandemic devastated government finances across Africa and South Asia, leaving many countries carrying elevated debt burdens that have constrained public investment in infrastructure. Aid budgets from wealthy nations also contracted, removing a critical source of funding for electrification programs.
The global energy crisis. The disruption caused by the war in Ukraine sent fuel and equipment prices surging, making grid extension more expensive at precisely the moment when budgets were tightest.
Cuts in international development aid. Recent years have seen significant reductions in overseas development aid from several major donor countries, directly impacting electrification financing. This has been particularly damaging for the poorest nations, which are most dependent on external funding.
Climate events. Floods, droughts, and extreme weather events — increasingly severe due to climate change — have repeatedly disrupted both existing infrastructure and ongoing electrification projects across parts of East Africa, the Sahel, and South Asia.
A structural paradox. Some sub-Saharan African countries have actually built too much power generation capacity in certain locations while failing to invest in the transmission and distribution networks needed to reach communities. The result is a paradox: power plants sit underutilized while millions live in the dark just kilometers away.
The Human Cost of Energy Poverty
Electricity deprivation isn’t simply an inconvenience. Its consequences ripple through every dimension of human wellbeing.
Health. Without electricity, clinics cannot refrigerate vaccines, run diagnostic equipment, or maintain sterile environments after dark. Women in areas without power are significantly more likely to die during childbirth, as complications that could be managed with basic equipment become fatal. Households dependent on kerosene lamps and open fires for light and cooking face chronic exposure to indoor air pollution — the WHO estimates this kills more than 3 million people per year.
Education. Children without electricity at home cannot study after dark. Schools without power cannot run computers or maintain consistent learning environments. Research consistently shows that electricity access is strongly linked to improvements in literacy, school attendance, and educational attainment — and that the absence of power is one of the single largest drivers of educational inequality between wealthy and poor nations.
Economic exclusion. The modern economy runs on electricity. Mobile connectivity, digital payments, e-commerce, online banking, cold-chain agriculture, and manufacturing all require reliable power. Communities without it are structurally locked out of economic growth. A small business owner who cannot refrigerate perishable goods, charge a phone, or operate machinery is constrained in ways that no amount of entrepreneurial spirit can overcome.
Gender inequality. The burden of energy poverty falls disproportionately on women and girls. Women spend more time on domestic tasks made harder without electricity — cooking over open fires, fetching water by hand, managing households without labor-saving devices. World Bank data shows that households headed by women in Africa and South Asia are less likely to have off-grid electricity access than those headed by men, with affordability being the key barrier.
The 2030 Target: Still Reachable?
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 7 calls for universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy by 2030. As of 2026, that goal appears deeply out of reach under current trajectories.
The IEA’s most recent projections suggest that even under stated government policies, around 645 million people will still lack access to electricity in 2030. Roughly 85% of them — about 545 million people — will be in sub-Saharan Africa.
The countries that together represent the greatest share of the remaining challenge are: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. These nine countries alone account for more than half of the global unelectrified population projected to remain by 2030. Notably, fewer than one in five African countries currently have formal national targets to achieve universal electricity access by that date.
Reasons for Cautious Optimism
Despite the sobering numbers, there are genuine reasons to believe the pace of progress can accelerate.
Solar costs have collapsed. Solar PV is now the cheapest source of electricity in history, and the price continues to fall. In communities far from any national grid, standalone solar home systems and solar-powered mini-grids can deliver affordable electricity faster and more cheaply than conventional grid extension. In 2024, 4.8 million people in sub-Saharan Africa received electricity for the first time via grids or mini-grids, the vast majority of them solar-powered.
The off-grid revolution is maturing. Pay-as-you-go solar companies like M-Kopa in Kenya and Bboxx across multiple African markets have pioneered business models that make clean energy accessible to low-income households. Customers pay small amounts via mobile money — a few dollars a week — and gain access to solar panels, lighting, phone charging, and increasingly, appliances like fans and televisions. More than 50 million off-grid solar products were sold in both 2022 and 2023. According to the IEA, off-grid solar is the most cost-effective solution for 41% of people currently without electricity access.
Record solar imports are driving progress. Chinese-manufactured solar panels have flooded African markets in recent years, dramatically reducing the cost of both household systems and larger mini-grid installations. Sub-Saharan Africa saw record solar PV imports in 2024 and early 2025, and new electrification policies in key countries are beginning to capitalize on this.
Mission 300. In January 2025, the World Bank and African Development Bank launched Mission 300 — an initiative backed by roughly €50 billion aimed at connecting 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa to electricity by 2030. It combines grid expansion, mini-grids, and standalone solar systems, with a strong emphasis on reaching remote and conflict-affected communities. If successfully implemented, it would represent the single largest electrification effort in history.
Leapfrogging the old model. Many African communities are bypassing the traditional centralized grid model entirely, moving directly to decentralized solar solutions just as an earlier generation skipped landlines in favor of mobile phones. This “leapfrog” effect could dramatically compress the timeline for reaching universal access — if the financing and policy frameworks are in place.
The Financing Gap
Technology and political will are necessary but not sufficient. The fundamental obstacle to universal electricity access is money — specifically, the enormous gap between what is currently invested in electrification and what is needed.
Electricity sector investment in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to rise from around $30 billion in 2022 to $120 billion by 2030, with more than half directed toward renewables, particularly solar PV. But even this optimistic projection may fall short of what’s required, given the scale of the challenge and the fact that the remaining unconnected population is increasingly poor, remote, and expensive to reach.
International aid cuts have complicated the picture. Several major donor nations have reduced their overseas development spending in recent years, pulling funding from the energy access programs that many of the poorest countries depend on. Without a renewed commitment to development finance — and innovative mechanisms to de-risk private investment in frontier markets — the gap will persist.
A Basic Human Right?
The argument that access to energy is a fundamental human right has grown stronger over the past decade, not weaker. The COVID-19 pandemic starkly illustrated how electricity access divided those who could work, study, and seek healthcare remotely from those who could not. As the world becomes more digitized, the gap between the electrified and the unelectrified becomes not just a matter of convenience but of citizenship — of participation in the political, economic, and social life of the modern world.
The UN’s SDG framework recognizes this implicitly, but the international community has yet to treat energy poverty with the urgency it deserves. The children doing homework by kerosene lamplight in the DRC, the clinic in rural Tanzania that shuts down after dark, the smallholder farmer in Niger who cannot power an irrigation pump — these are not distant abstractions. They are the daily consequences of a failure of global ambition and investment.
The Path Forward
Progress on electricity access is not impossible — it has happened at scale before, and the tools to accelerate it exist. Solar technology is cheap and improving. Business models for delivering off-grid power to low-income communities are proven. The political will, at least nominally, is present in initiatives like Mission 300.
What remains missing is the pace. The world is moving in the right direction, but far too slowly for the 730 million people still waiting in the dark. Closing the gap before 2030 would require more than tripling the current rate of new connections — a challenge that demands not incremental policy tweaks but a fundamental reimagining of how the global community finances and prioritizes energy access.
The good news is that, unlike many global challenges, this one has clear solutions. The question is whether the political will and financial commitment will materialize in time.
Sources: International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook; World Bank Energy Progress Report 2025; ESMAP Tracking SDG7 Report; Mission 300 Initiative; IRENA Renewable Energy Statistics 2025.
