The world pledged electricity for everyone by 2030. On its own 2024 numbers 655 million people are still without it — and among the 210 countries that report both rates, 83% of the unpowered live in the countryside

Universal electricity was supposed to be the achievable half of Sustainable Development Goal 7 — a target 7.1 that the United Nations set for 2030 and that a majority of the world has already met. Read every country's World Bank-compiled 2024 access rate and the promise is close to kept in one place and barely begun in another, and the line between them is not rich versus poor. It is city versus countryside. We pulled the 2024 electricity-access rates the World Bank compiles for the SDG 7.1.1 indicator — the tracking series whose custodians are the IEA, IRENA, the UN Statistics Division, the World Bank and the WHO — for every economy carrying a 2024 value, 215 in all after removing the Bank's regional and income-group aggregates. In the 2024 data, 122 of the 215 are recorded at effectively 100% access; 93 sit below it. Multiply each shortfall by the country's population and about 655 million people lived without electricity — roughly 8% of humanity, against a global access rate of 91.9%. ^mmodeled The gap is a rural gap. The same series reports a separate urban and rural rate for 210 of these economies, and of their 623 million people without power, 519 million — 83% — live in rural areas. ^mmodeled Globally the split is stark: 98% of urban residents have electricity, against 85% of rural ones, and in the countries still short the rural rate collapses. The Democratic Republic of the Congo reaches 55% of its urban residents and 1% of its rural ones. Angola reports 78% urban and 1.3% rural; Equatorial Guinea 89% and 5%; Burkina Faso 88% and 13%. In each, the state that has nearly lit its cities has reached fewer than one rural resident in seven — and in DR Congo and Angola, fewer than one in fifty. ^mmodeled The shortfall is also concentrated. Ranked by people rather than by rate, eight countries hold half of the 655 million, and 22 hold 80%. ^mmodeled Nigeria (62% access, 87 million without) and DR Congo (23%, 85 million) alone account for a quarter. Just under half the 93 short economies — 46 — are in Sub-Saharan Africa, but they hold 88% of the people the shortfall counts. ^mmodeled

The following is analysis, not fact. A national access rate averages two very different countries into one number. The Democratic Republic of the Congo's 23% is not a nation that is one-quarter lit; it is a country that has electrified most of its cities and almost none of its villages, and whose population is spread across both. Read the country-level average alone and the finding — that the last stretch to universal access is overwhelmingly a rural build — disappears. It only surfaces when the urban and rural rates are read side by side across the whole set. ^mmodeled Why the deficit sits where it does is a question these two rates raise but do not answer. The remaining unconnected population is disproportionately rural, remote and low-income, and the custodian report frames the same pattern — a reading consistent with the economics of extending a grid across sparse distances costing more per household than wiring a dense city. But that is a hypothesis these figures are consistent with, not a mechanism they isolate: no cost, terrain or conflict variable was joined here, and no competing predictor was modeled. ^sspeculative The whole-record point is one no single country shows: 655 million is not a wall of unreached nations but a rural shortfall concentrated in a handful of them, hiding inside averages that count a lit capital and a dark hinterland as one figure.

These are modeled estimates, not a census — the access series blends household surveys, administrative data and interpolation, and the rural and urban splits carry more uncertainty than the national totals. The 655 million and the 623 million rest on different denominators (215 economies with a national rate versus the 210 that also report a rural/urban split), so the two totals are not identical and neither is exact. A gap is also not a failure of will: the unconnected genuinely live where a grid is most expensive to reach, and the same report argues the answer is distributed solar and mini-grids rather than more transmission line — so a low rural rate may reflect the cost of the terrain, not a country's neglect of it. And progress is real: the custodian report finds Central and Southern Asia cut their access gap from over 400 million in 2010 to under 30 million, which is why the remaining shortfall looks as African and as rural as it does. ^mmodeled

**View from the SDG 7 custodian agencies:** the headline access rate was always going to plateau as the cheap, urban connections were made first; the hard residual is rural, remote and conflict-affected, and closing it needs targeted finance for off-grid and mini-grid power, not a grid that may never reach it economically. **View from an electrified capital such as Kinshasa or Luanda:** near-universal city access is a genuine achievement, and a national average that buries it under a near-zero rural rate can read as failure where a city sees success — the divergence is a map of where the population lives, not only of where the wires are. ^mmodeled