Electrification is the least glamorous development indicator and one of the most consequential. Without a reliable grid there is no refrigeration for vaccines, no lighting to study by, and no mechanised anything.

Across 211 countries, the share of population with access to electricity rose from 75.6% in 2000 to 89.8% in 2024.

The countries that moved furthest

• Afghanistan — 4.4% → 87.8%
• Cambodia — 16.6% → 99.2%
• Solomon Islands — 4.7% → 81.5%
• Yemen — 49.2% → 86.3%
• India — 60.3% → 99.9%

Afghanistan is the one that stops people. In 2000, roughly 1 in 23 Afghans had electricity at home. Today it is closer to 9 in 10. That happened across two decades of war and a change of government, which should complicate anyone's model of how development works.

India is the larger story by population. Going from 60.3% to 99.9% closed a gap of nearly forty percentage points across the second-largest population on earth, which makes it the biggest electrification effort in the dataset by a wide margin.

The two that went backwards

Of 211 countries, exactly two finished lower than they started:

• Libya — 99.8% → 77.4%
• Syria — 93.4% → 89.3%

Both had near-universal access in 2000. Both had civil wars. Libya lost more than a fifth of its coverage from a starting point of essentially everyone connected.

This is the part worth dwelling on. Electrification is usually described as a ratchet — once built, a grid stays built. These two are the counterexample, and they show the ratchet is political rather than physical. Infrastructure degrades to the level the state can maintain.

What access does and does not mean

"Access" is a low bar. The indicator counts a household as having access if it can draw electricity, not whether that supply is continuous, affordable, or sufficient. A household with four hours of power a day counts the same as one with twenty-four. India's 99.9% is real connection; it is not the same claim as reliable supply, and the gap between the two is where most of the remaining problem sits.

It says nothing about what generates the power. A newly connected grid may run on coal, diesel or hydro. See why the world's "most renewable" countries are its poorest for why the obvious follow-up metric misleads badly.

The remaining gap is concentrated. The roughly 10% of the world without access is not spread thinly. It is overwhelmingly rural sub-Saharan Africa, which is also where population is growing fastest — so the absolute number of unconnected people falls much more slowly than the percentage suggests.

Explore the full map of electricity access by country, or try to date a map of it yourself in year mode. Source: World Bank Open Data, 2000–2024.