Where electricity access is still not universal

The World Bank’s electrification series — SDG indicator 7.1.1, compiled by its ESMAP programme and published through the Bank’s indicator API — gives the share of each country’s people with electricity at home, every year from 1990 to 2024. Every year in it comes from the same 2026 release, recalculated on one method, so the years can be set against each other. This piece reads that release from 2000, the first year it covers more than 200 countries. The figures are as they stood on 13 November 2026; the statistic page is the one kept current.

A shared top, and a long tail

In 2024, 122 of the 215 countries measured report 100%. No single country is highest: they share it. The number has nearly doubled since 2000, when 65 of 211 countries reported full access, and it was 74 in 2010. Every one of the 47 European countries in the file is at 100%. So is the middle country of the whole field — a measure on which the middle country read 96.7% in 2000 now reads 100%, which means that more than half of the world’s countries have finished.

That leaves 93 that have not, and the spread among them is wide. Fourteen read 99% or more, within a point of the top. The rest run down to South Sudan, lowest in 2024 and alone there, at 5.4%.

Where the gap is

Fifteen countries are below half in 2024, against 52 in 2000. Fourteen of the fifteen are in Africa, spread across its east, west and centre; the fifteenth is Papua New Guinea.

Country	Sub-region	2000	2024
South Sudan	Eastern Africa	—	5.4%
Chad	Middle Africa	3.1%	13.4%
Malawi	Eastern Africa	4.8%	15.6%
Central African Republic	Middle Africa	6.0%	18.2%
Burundi	Eastern Africa	2.5%	20.1%
Niger	Western Africa	6.5%	21.3%
DR Congo	Middle Africa	6.7%	22.5%
Burkina Faso	Western Africa	9.1%	34.0%
Liberia	Western Africa	—	34.9%
Mozambique	Eastern Africa	6.1%	36.9%
Sierra Leone	Western Africa	7.7%	39.2%
Madagascar	Eastern Africa	12.6%	42.5%
Papua New Guinea	Melanesia	12.4%	43.3%
Guinea-Bissau	Western Africa	—	43.7%
Mali	Western Africa	9.6%	49.5%

A dash means the 2000 file holds no reading for that country. Every country in the table with a 2000 reading has gained since then — Mali by 39.9 points, Chad by 10.3 — and none has yet reached half.

Africa as a whole tells the same story in one number. Of its 54 countries in the file, 48 are below 100% in 2024, and only six — Algeria, Egypt, Mauritius, Morocco, Seychelles and Tunisia — report full access. Its middle country read 24.2% in 2000, among the 51 African countries measured that year, 44.5% in 2015 and 60.9% in 2024. That is the largest rise of any continent’s middle country, from the furthest back.

Outside Africa the gap is narrower and scattered. After Papua New Guinea the lowest readings are Haiti at 53.9%, North Korea at 61.4% and Vanuatu at 65.5%; then Myanmar at 80.4%, the Solomon Islands at 81.5%, Yemen at 86.3% and Afghanistan at 87.8%. No country in the Americas, Asia or Europe is below half.

The fastest climbs

Measured in percentage points since 2000, the largest gains are in Asia and the Pacific. Afghanistan rose from 4.4% to 87.8%, a gain of 83.4 points, though its line is far from steady (below); Cambodia from 16.6% to 99.2%; the Solomon Islands from 4.7% to 81.5%; Timor-Leste from 17.8% to 94.3%. Bhutan went from 31.1% to 100%. South Asia’s large countries moved the same way: Bangladesh from 32.0% to 99.5%, Nepal from 29.9% to 97.9%, India from 60.3% to 99.9% and Pakistan from 72.8% to 95.7%.

Over the last decade the fastest movers are African. Since 2015 Rwanda has risen from 22.8% to 72.0%, Uganda from 18.5% to 55.3% and Kenya from 41.6% to 77.0%. Each of those three gained more in nine years than in the fifteen before.

Where it fell

Only two countries read lower in 2024 than in 2000. Libya reported 99.8% in 2000; its reading falls in every year after that, to 67.0% in 2018, and has since recovered to 77.4%. Syria went from 93.4% to 89.3%, a slower slide across the whole period. The file records the falls; it does not record their causes.

Read a single year with care

The series moves in steps as well as slopes, and a few of the 2024 readings are steps. Guatemala reads 100% in 2023 and 90.9% in 2024. Timor-Leste reads 100% in 2023 and 94.3% a year later. Papua New Guinea goes the other way, from 20.5% in 2023 to 43.3% in 2024. Afghanistan’s line jumps in both directions: 89.5% in 2014, 71.5% in 2015, 97.7% in 2016, and 85.3% in 2022. Altogether 15 countries read at least half a point lower in 2024 than in 2023, and 53 at least half a point higher.

Moves this size, in a single year and in both directions, look more like new survey evidence about a country arriving than like a year’s change on the ground, but the file does not say which evidence moved which country. These are the readings the Bank publishes, stored here exactly as published; the safer comparison for any one country is over several years, which is what the line on the statistic page shows.

Town and country

The same release carries a rural series, and for 209 countries in 2024 it shows how unevenly the national figure is shared. The rural middle country also reads 100%, and 121 countries report full rural access. But the largest gaps between the national and the rural reading are very large. Equatorial Guinea reads 65.1% nationally and 5.1% in the countryside; Angola 55.5% and 1.3%; Gabon 95.1% and 51.3%; Nigeria 62.5% and 23.5%; Haiti 53.9% and 15.0%.

The lowest rural readings are South Sudan’s 0.7%, DR Congo’s 1.0%, Angola’s 1.3% and the Central African Republic’s 2.0%. One rural reading is not printed on this site at all: the Bank gives Chad 100% rural access in 2024, against 0.4% a year earlier and a national rate of 13.4%, and a rural figure the Bank’s own national figure cannot reconcile is left out of the rural statistic rather than shown.

What the figure measures

A country counts a household as having access when it has electricity at home; the figure says nothing about how many hours a day the power is on, how much it costs or what it is made from. A country at 100% can still have frequent cuts, and one far below it may be adding connections every month. What the electricity is made from, and how often firms name it as an obstacle to their business, are measured separately on the Energy topic page. What this series does show is where the last stretch of the work lies: overwhelmingly in Africa, and within those countries, outside the towns.