Energy access – is UN SDG 7 ambitious enough?

The UN Sustainable Development Goal SDG 7 commits to ensuring universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services by 2030, with the proportion of the population with access to electricity being one of the indicators of progress. According to the World Bank, the proportion of the global population with access to electricity increased from 78 percent in 2000 to 91 percent in 2021. While policy discussions often focus on whether or not we are on course to achieve the SDG7 target (spoiler alert – current trends only take us to 92% by 2030), another equally important question is what does ‘access’ actually mean in terms of kilowatt hours per capita and is it enough to make a real difference to people’s lives? 

What does ‘access to energy’ really mean?

It is surprisingly difficult to pin down what SDG 7 actually means by ‘access’ as it is not quantified or defined in the official list of SDG indicators. The International Energy Agency defines access as “a household having initial access to sufficient electricity to power a basic bundle of energy services – at a minimum, several lightbulbs, phone charging, a radio and potentially a fan or television”, but others suggest an even lower bar, noting that having access to electricity is generally defined in international statistics as having an electricity source that can provide very basic lighting, and charge a phone or power a radio for 4 hours per day.

The World Bank has developed a 5-tier system to define levels of access to electricity and the services it can provide in the home. Tier 0 is no electricity, tier 1 represents enough electricity to charge a phone and run a single bulb for 4 hours a day, while tier 5 is virtually 24/7 access to power and the ability to run all the household appliances considered the ‘norm’ in European and North American households.  

Figure 1: Daily availability by tier of electricity access by the World Bank

How much energy access makes a difference?

To take Ethiopia as an example, only 42% of the population has access to electricity, and of those, only a quarter have access to tier 4 or tier 5 levels of supply, while the remainder are mostly evenly split between tier 3 or tier 1. There is an argument to be made therefore that SDG7 is not ambitious enough given the ‘access’ being planned for can be as little as four hours per day of a supply, sufficient for a single lightbulb, phone charging and perhaps a small TV.  Such low levels of electricity consumption (equivalent to around 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per person per annum) can only deliver marginal improvements to the quality of life and are insufficient to support the productive uses of energy that might impact economic activity or support communal services such as health or education. 

A synthesis of studies carried out under our Energy & Economic Growth Applied Research Programme provided further evidence to this effect. The report found that low levels of provision and consumption of electricity led to low impacts with, for example, recently connected rural mini-grid consumers in Sierra Leone realising no significant economic, educational or health benefits from electrification due, at least in part, to the very limited scale of the supply provided.

Raising the ambition for global energy access

The Rockefeller Foundation argues that global energy ambitions should be raised and has proposed a 1000kWh per capita per annum Modern Energy Minimum Standard. Whilst still significantly lower than the median annual consumption of 6720kWh per capita for high-income countries, it allows for 300kWh per capita per year at home, plus 700kWh per capita per year in the wider economy to enable industry, commerce, transport, agriculture, and public services needed to underpin the economic activity needed to deliver higher incomes and growth in household consumption.  

The reason Rockefeller proposes using separate thresholds for household and non-household consumption is to better capture what it means to live in energy poverty in different contexts. For example, relatively poor people may live in a high energy-consuming economy but only be able to afford very small amounts of electricity at home, and thus suffer from energy poverty. At the same time, relatively wealthy people may be able to afford a generator that allows them to consume a lot of energy at home despite living in a low-energy consuming economy with poor electricity supplies. Outside of their home, however, energy is still a meaningful everyday constraint and they also remain affected by energy poverty, albeit in a different manner.

What more needs to be done?

Setting a new and more ambitious minimum standard for energy access is important to ensure energy planning adequately addresses energy poverty in the home and in the wider economy. The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1000kWh per capita per annum proposal is a good candidate for such a standard. Meeting standards around availability of supply will not alone, of course, be sufficient to end energy poverty. There are many reasons, for example, why even when sufficient electricity is supplied, this alone doesn’t always lead to social and economic impacts, something that is explored further in this article (page 24).   However, setting more ambitious targets for energy access is an important first step that deserves greater attention from the global community.  

About the author:

Simon Trace is our Principal Consultant in Energy, Resources and Growth and has over 35 years’ experience working in international development.