Access to Electricity

Energy alone is not sufficient for creating the conditions for economic growth, but it is certainly necessary. It is impossible to operate a factory, run a shop, grow crops or deliver goods to consumers without using some form of energy. Access to electricity is particularly crucial to human development as electricity is, in practice, indispensable for certain basic activities, such as lighting, refrigeration and the running of household appliances, and cannot easily be replaced by other forms of energy. Individuals’ access to electricity is one of the most clear and un-distorted indication of a country’s energy poverty status.

In a continuing effort to improve our understanding of the electrification process, we have updated, for the fourth time, the database on electrification rates that we first built for the WEO 2002. The database shows detailed data on urban and rural electrification collected from industry, national surveys and international sources.
Electricity access is more and more at the forefront of governments’ preoccupations, especially in the poorest countries. As a consequence a lot of rural electrification programs and national electrification agencies have been created in these countries to monitor more accurately the needs and the status of rural development and electrification. We have incorporated the latest available information to give the most accurate picture to date of the electricity access in the world, by region and by country.

Table B1: Electricity access in 2008 - Regional aggregates
	Population without electricity millions	Electrification rate %	Urban electrification rate %	Rural electrification rate %
North Africa	2	98.9	99.6	98.2
Sub-Saharan Africa	587	28.5	57.5	11.9
Africa	589	40.0	66.8	22.7
China & East Asia	195	90.2	96.2	85.5
South Asia	614	60.2	88.4	48.4
Developing Asia	809	77.2	93.5	67.2
Middle East	21	89.1	98.5	70.6
Developing countries	1,453	72.0	90.0	58.4
Transition economies & OECD	3	99.8	100.0	99.5
World	1,456	78.2	93.4	63.2

Several major revisions have been made, notably for Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Overall electrification rates have increased due to better data and more recent census and rural surveys. Especially for India, Bangladesh and Pakistan much more census data than in previous years was available.
Based on a detailed country-by-country database updated for this Outlook, we estimate that in 2008 the number of people without access to electricity was 1.5 billion or 22% of the world’s population. Some 85% of those people live in rural areas.

Since the issue of energy poverty was first analysed in the World Energy Outlook 2002, the number of people without access to electricity has decreased by an estimated 188 million, despite the growth in world population of more than 500 million.

South Asia currently accounts for 42% of the total number of people in the world without access to electricity, even though the percentage of the population with access to electricity in South Asia increased by around 8% over the last three years. Bangladesh, India and Pakistan in total have 570 million people without electricity, 92% of whom live in rural areas. In Sub-Saharan Africa only 29% of the population has access to electricity today (Figure 1).
Despite slightly increasing electrification rates, the total number of people in the region without access to electricity has grown by 78 million since 2001 — mainly due to rapid population growth, which has outpaced electrification.