plate 342 · 2024 data

Sub-Saharan Africa now holds 88% of people without electricity

Share of the world's people without electricity living in sub-Saharan Africa, 2010 to 2024. Access rate times population, 214 countries.

Africa's century
  1. 1. By 2100, more than 1 in 3 people will be African
  2. 2. Nearly half the world's under-25s will be African by 2100
  3. 3. DR Congo is projected to outgrow the US by 2100
  4. 4. Kinshasa will soon be bigger than Paris and London combined
  5. 5. Two-thirds of the world's mobile money moves in Africa
  6. 6. Volcanic heat makes nearly 45% of the power Kenya generates
  7. 7. Africa's solar imports more than doubled since early 2024
  8. 8. DR Congo mines three-quarters of the world's cobalt
  9. 9. Most people in Africa are still offline
  10. 10. Africa formally recycles less than 1% of its e-waste
  11. 11. Ethiopia added over a third of Africa's new renewable power
  12. 12. Nigeria's cities now hold more people than Japan's
  13. 13. Sudan now has the world's most people displaced at home
  14. 14. Nigeria now has almost 25 million more people than Brazil
  15. 15. Six of the ten fastest-growing big cities are African
  16. 16. Africa now has more hungry people than Asia
  17. 17. Six in ten child deaths now happen in sub-Saharan Africa
  18. 18. Rwanda spread electricity faster than any country since 2014
  19. 19. Nigeria now eats more rice than Japan
  20. 20. More sub-Saharan Africans now have mobile money than bank accounts
  21. 21. Sub-Saharan Africa's cities now hold more people than Latin America's
  22. 22. DR Congo tripled its copper mining in ten years
  23. 23. Nitrogen dioxide over Khartoum fell 39% after war began
  24. 24. Countries mostly without electricity fell from 33 to 15
  25. 25. Seven in ten West African mobile money accounts sit idle
  26. 26. Nigeria became the third-biggest sender of students abroad
  27. 27. Guinea overtook Australia as the world's biggest bauxite miner
  28. 28. DR Congo passed Chile in refined copper
  29. 29. Burkina Faso now sends half its exports to the UAE
  30. 30. Nouakchott's mobile internet sped from Africa's slowest to top 30
  31. 31. Nigeria now imports more solar panels than generators
  32. 32. Zimbabwe climbed to fourth among the world's lithium miners
  33. 33. Services now employ twice as many Ghanaian women as farms
  34. 34. Sub-Saharan Africa doubled its grain, mostly by farming more land
  35. 35. Sub-Saharan Africa added more rural people than the whole world
  36. 36. France fell from first to third among Côte d'Ivoire's suppliers
  37. 37. China's car sales to Ethiopia are now mostly electric
  38. 38. Guinea rose from 17th to second for investment in Africa
  39. 39. Africa now mines three-quarters of the world's manganese
  40. 40. Tanzania rose from no graphite to world's third-biggest miner
  41. 41. DR Congo has more babies each year than the EU
  42. 42. More Malawians go online than have electricity at home
  43. 43. Nigeria is now Brazil's biggest supplier of urea fertiliser
  44. 44. 19 sub-Saharan countries are now mostly urban, up from 7
  45. 45. Sub-Saharan Africa added 13 million births a year since 2000
  46. 46. Sub-Saharan Africa now holds 88% of people without electricity
  47. 47. Malawi's life expectancy rose 21 years, more than anywhere
  48. 48. Ethiopia's wheat harvest nearly doubled, mostly from higher yields
  49. 49. In purchasing power, Egypt overtook Nigeria as Africa's biggest economy
  50. 50. Kenyans abroad send home more than Kenya receives in aid
88%

of the world's 655 million people without electricity live in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, up from 52% in 2010.

579 million

People without electricity in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024, against 596 million in 2010; the rest of the world fell from 558 million to 76 million.

All ten

countries with the most people without electricity are in sub-Saharan Africa in 2024; in 2010 four of the ten were in Asia.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators: access to electricity (EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS) and population (SP.POP.TOTL), 2024
the numbers & method
Sub-Saharan Africa now holds 88% of people without electricity. Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators: access to electricity (EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS) and population (SP.POP.TOTL), 2024.
sub-Saharan Africa (%)
201051.6
201564.3
202080.0
202488.4

Claim types Fact · Estimate

World Bank, World Development Indicators, access to electricity (% of population, EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS, World Bank SDG 7.1.1 series) and population, total (SP.POP.TOTL), last updated 8 Oct 2026, read from the World Bank via the progrss vault (GUIDELINES §4.11, wb-wdi passes value_checks). Derived value (progrss calculation, Estimate): people without electricity = (100 - access rate) / 100 x population, for each of 214 countries and areas with both values in the year; sub-Saharan Africa = the 48 countries in the World Bank region of that name; share = region total / sum of the 214. World total 1,154.5 million (2010), 969.4 (2015), 751.6 (2020), 655.2 (2024); sub-Saharan Africa 596.1, 623.0, 601.1, 579.0 million, i.e. 51.6%, 64.3%, 80.0%, 88.4%. The access rate is a World Bank estimate (household surveys and modelling), so the headcount is an estimate. Top ten by people without electricity, 2024: Nigeria 87.3 m, DR Congo 84.7, Ethiopia 57.3, Tanzania 32.6, Uganda 22.4, Mozambique 21.9, Niger 21.3, Madagascar 18.4, Malawi 18.3, Chad 17.6 (all sub-Saharan); 2010: India 294.7 m, Nigeria 86.7, Bangladesh 68.0, Ethiopia 67.5, DR Congo 59.6, Tanzania 38.1, Kenya 33.6, Uganda 28.5, Pakistan 25.7, Myanmar 25.1. 2024 is the latest year WDI reports. North Africa is not in the sub-Saharan region. Claim types: access rates Fact (publisher estimate), headcounts and shares progrss calculation. Licence: World Bank data, CC BY 4.0. API last updated 11 Nov 2026; values re-read identical via the vault's own fetch.

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