A photo of two people sitting at a table and writing by the light of a lamp.

    Access to energy Energy for a liveable future

    Right now, roughly one person out of every ten in the world still does not have access to electricity at home. Since 2013, the number of people without access to electricity has fallen by about 450 million to 666 million, whilst the global population has grown. That is progress. But it is not enough. The task is even greater when it comes to access to clean energy for cooking. There are still 2.1 billion people in the world using cooking methods and fuels that are harmful to the environment and their health – although that number is 14 percentage points below what it was ten years ago. However, the progress made over the last few years in this regard has largely been concentrated in Asia. In Africa, energy poverty is still a huge problem.

    It is a problem that the international community is now hoping to address with increased vigour. At the start of 2025, at the first Africa Energy Summit in Tanzania, “Mission 300” was agreed. The aim of the Mission is to help another 300 million people in Africa alone get access to electricity. That works out at more than half the global unmet need and would be a huge leap forward.

    The intention is that this would, as far as possible, be based on renewables, because many developing countries have especially high potential in this regard thanks to particularly intensive solar radiation. Renewables are also the best and cheapest solution for generating energy in many parts of the world thanks to the massive fall in recent years in the cost of generating renewable energy. This makes it possible to provide electric light for studying, and electricity for keeping medicines cool and for operating medical equipment, as well as for processing agricultural products and running businesses in the commercial and the trades sector.

    Germany is one of the most important partners for developing and emerging economies when it comes to energy matters, including in Africa. For example, the BMZ is assisting various countries in Africa such as Senegal, Kenya and South Africa in supplying more people with energy and driving forward an energy transition for all. The BMZ’s activities range from loans for large solar installations or for hydropower stations to training energy technicians and advising on regulatory frameworks, and building out off-grid energy sources like village electricity grids or solar installations for individual households, businesses and social facilities. In this way, renewables offer a solution in places where the high cost of power lines means that rural areas will not be joined to the grid anytime soon.

    With its two supranational multi-donor programmes GET.pro and EnDev, the BMZ is contributing to creating an attractive investment climate for renewable energy and to providing energy for millions more people. The same goes for traditional cooking stoves, which are gradually being replaced with German support by more modern, energy-efficient stoves. In their traditional form such stoves are time-consuming to use, damaging to the environment and, because of soot particles in the air, also unhealthy.