TRACKING SDG7 - THE ENERGY PROGRESS REPORT 2021

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed the stark worldwide inequalities in access to reliable energy and health care, especially in rural and peri-urban areas, and has highlighted the need to expand energy access to help populations mitigate the effects of the crisis. [...] On a global scale, the percentage of the population gaining access has been largely matched by population growth, causing a decades-long stagnation in the number of people without access to clean cooking, referred to here as the “access deficit.” Figure ES.4 illustrates the annualized increase in the number of people with access to clean cooking fuels and technologies compared with the annualized. [...] In the regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern and South-eastern Asia, more than 98 percent of the population had access to electricity by 2019.4 In Western Asia and Northern Africa, and in Central Asia and Southern Asia, 94 and 95 percent of the population, respectively, enjoyed access in the same year. [...] Fragile and conflict-affected countries: The level of access to electricity in the 39 countries on the World Bank’s list of fragile and conflict-affected countries (World Bank 2020a) grew faster than the global average annual growth of 0.8 percentage points, rising from 45 percent of the total population in 2010 to 54 percent in 2019. [...] In view of the modest progress over the l8a3s%t three years of the period, and of the current pandemic and the difficulty of electrifying the populations that remain unserved, theP rofignreassl bsettwreeetnc 2h01 t0o an dt h20e1 9road to universal access is bound to be challenging.