KEY POINTS
- Sub-Saharan Africa held 86 per cent of the global electricity access gap in 2024.
- About 563 million people across the region were still living without electricity last year.
- Nigeria has the world’s largest gap, with 87.2 million people lacking power.
Sub-Saharan Africa now carries almost the entire weight of the world’s electricity access problem. The region accounted for 86 per cent of the global access gap in 2024, with 563 million people still living without power.
The figure comes from Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report 2026. The International Energy Agency, the International Renewable Energy Agency and the World Bank jointly published it.
Worldwide, 655 million people lacked electricity in 2024. The vast majority of them lived in sub-Saharan Africa.
The region’s share of the global deficit has climbed sharply. It stood at 49 per cent in 2010 and reached 86 per cent by 2024, even as electrification projects expanded across the continent.
Connections rising, but population rising faster
The core problem is a race the grid keeps losing. Between 2022 and 2024, sub-Saharan Africa added about 42 million electricity connections a year. Its population grew by roughly 38 million a year over the same period.
That left a net gain of only about 4 million fewer people without power each year. The number without electricity has barely moved since 2010, slipping from 565 million to 563 million.
Progress is uneven across the continent. East Africa cut its access deficit by 35 million people between 2010 and 2024, helped by grid expansion and off-grid energy in countries like Rwanda and Kenya. Central Africa’s deficit rose by 34 million over the same stretch.
The country-level picture is stark. Nigeria has the world’s largest gap at 87.2 million people without power, a position it has held for four straight years. The Democratic Republic of Congo follows at 84.7 million and Ethiopia at 57.3 million.
Where the money is going wrong
The report points to a financing problem as much as an engineering one. International public finance remains cautious, and it flows in the wrong shape for the job.
Debt made up about 80 per cent of total energy finance globally in 2024. Equity, the risk-bearing capital that gets early-stage projects off the ground, fell to just 2 per cent.
That matters because grids alone cannot close the gap. Many rural and low-income communities are too costly or too slow to reach by national grid, leaving mini-grids and off-grid solar to carry much of the load.
Some momentum exists. Mission 300, backed by the World Bank and the African Development Bank, has connected more than 50 million people and aims to reach 300 million by 2030.
The harder truth sits underneath the numbers. Until connections clearly outpace births, and until riskier capital starts to flow, Africa’s access gap will keep refilling almost as fast as it empties.
