East Africa a bright spot as world crawls towards energy goals
Friday, May 4, 2018
By Megan Rowling
The world is moving too slowly to meet targets to provide electric power and clean cooking to everyone on the planet by 2030, with progress on using less-polluting fuels in the kitchen especially poor, international agencies said on Wednesday.
The number of people living without access to electricity in 2016 was a billion, or 13 percent of the global population, with the vast majority in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, new data released by the World Bank, the United Nations and other organizations showed.
Unless efforts to get power to hard-to-reach areas are ramped up, an estimated 674 million people – about 8 percent of the world’s population – will still live without electricity in 2030, they said in a report.
In 2016, 3 billion people, more than 40 percent of the global population, did not have access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking.
Indoor air pollution from burning wood, dung, kerosene and other dirty fuels causes over 4 million deaths a year, with women and children at highest risk, the report said.
Photo courtesy of Señor Codo.
Source: Reuters (link opens in a new window)
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