Energy Access

Energy access measures whether a household or a country's population is connected to modern energy services at all, most commonly tracked through electricity connection and through access to clean, non-solid cooking fuel rather than wood, charcoal or dung burned indoors. The United Nations Secretary-General launched the Sustainable Energy for All initiative in 2011 to put universal energy access on the international agenda, and the goal was later folded into Sustainable Development Goal 7, which targets universal access to affordable, reliable, modern energy by 2030. As of 2022, an estimated 759 million people still lacked consistent access to electricity and about 2.6 billion people still relied on dangerous, inefficient cooking arrangements, concentrated overwhelmingly in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.