Will Africa still be energy-poor in 2050?

Projections suggest that electricity consumption across the region will still be incredibly low decades from now.

Last month, I published an article on Our World in Data — Four minutes of air conditioning — that compared residential electricity consumption per person across various countries, to how much power is needed for cooling technologies.

I wanted to answer the basic question: how many hours could the average person run an air conditioner for with their daily electricity “budget”?¹

You can see the results below. Forget hours — in many of the world’s energy-poor countries, people only consume enough electricity to use an AC for mere minutes.

The point was not that air conditioners are terrible energy-guzzlers (I did the same comparison for an electric fan, and the results were also pretty depressing). It’s that billions of people in the world still live in deep energy poverty.

How might this change over the next 20 to 30 years?

The International Energy Agency’s scenarios to 2050 get a lot of attention, but most of this focuses on how much CO₂ they generate, and how far we are from net-zero. Here I want to look at what they suggest about energy poverty, with a focus on electricity.

In the chart below you can see how much electricity different countries or regions generate per person today.² These regional and country selections come from the IEA; I realise that they use a broad brush and talking about “Africa” or “Asia Pacific” as some single entity hides a lot of variation.

As you can see, the average across Africa is around five times lower than the global average, tens times lower than the European Union, and twenty times lower than the US. Keep in mind that this data is not just about households: it also includes electricity used in industry and commercial services, so having extremely low levels of consumption not only matters for individuals at home, but reflects a lack of infrastructure and economic engine.

How does the IEA suggest this will change by 2050?

In blue, you can see the projected growth in electricity consumption per person in the IEA’s “Current Policies Scenario”. This tries to reflect where countries are heading under energy system policies that are already in place. It takes factors such as population and economic growth, and changes in the costs of technologies into account.

The gap between Africa and the rest of the world does not shrink. It gets bigger. Per person, it would consume around six times less than the global average. The gap between Africa and other energy-poor regions will grow too. By 2050, Africa still wouldn't have reached the consumption level that India has today, which is already a very low baseline (the average person in India could not power just one hour of AC).

The outlook for Africa is no different in the “Stated Policies Scenario”, which aims to reflect what will happen if countries deliver on their stated policies. I’ve made a small interactive grapher showing these different scenarios and charts, so you can explore the data for yourself.³

The main reason why energy poverty rates are still so high in these scenarios is poor economic growth. It’s one of the key inputs into the scenario, and is based on projections from the IMF, and later, modelled growth based on factors such as labour supply and total factor productivity.

These projections for Africa do not look good. My colleague, Max Roser, recently wrote about the implications of these projections for extreme poverty. The number of people living on less than $3 per day in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow over the coming decades. That’s because many of the world’s poorest are currently living in countries stagnant — or even shrinking — economies. If this is what monetary poverty looks like, it has obvious spillovers to energy poverty.

Many will argue that these projections are too pessimistic in a world with increasingly cheap solar and storage. Cheap power not only offers people more electricity on a lower income, but at a macro-level, can unlock industrial output and services, and stimulate faster economic growth than expected. I think that’s plausible, but how much it will change these final figures I don’t have a good sense of.

Affordable power will make a big difference, but I also want to emphasise how crucial economic growth is. It’s popular to say that “GDP is not all that matters”, which is true, but for the poorest countries it really does matter a lot. If these countries do not grow, billions will still be living in deep energy poverty decades from now. Unable to power a basic fridge to keep food fresh, or find relief from the gruelling heat with an hour of air conditioning.

Even if the world were to get anywhere close to zero emissions by 2050, this would be a huge failure. A low-carbon world where billions get left behind is not one that we should be happy with.

1. This was based on the International Energy Agency’s electricity breakdown by sector. I simply took the residential electricity consumed and divided it by population.

Note that underneath this average, there can be very large inequalities, with many people having no electricity at all, and those that do, consuming much more than this average value. Without more data on the complete distribution of consumption, this still gives us some insight into the depth of energy poverty in many countries.

2. I've calculated this — and the values for the scenarios that follow — by taking the IEA's total national or regional electricity generation, and dividing by its population values.

3. Note that data for the IEA's "Net Zero" scenario is not available by region. It may be available in its paywalled extended dataset, but I don't have access to it (and wouldn't be able to share the data even if I did).