After the lights came on

Chapter 1. The lights came on

In 2000, 1.34 billion people lived without electricity. Today, 657 million do.

The world's access rate went from 78% to 92%. Half of the people who lived in the dark in 2000 have power now.

Some countries did it in one generation.

Bangladesh went from 32% to almost everyone. Cambodia from 17% to 99%. Kenya from 15% to 77%. Rwanda from 6% to 72%. A child born in 2000 in these countries grew up watching the lights arrive.

Chapter 2. The people left in the dark

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the access rate doubled. The number of people without power still grew.

Access rose from 26% to 55%. But the population grew faster than the grid, so the number of people without electricity went from 506 million to 579 million. In 2000, 38% of the world's people without electricity lived here. Today, 88% do.

Two things are true at once: a bigger share has power, and more people do not.

15 countries still leave most people in the dark.

In South Sudan (5%), Chad (13%), Malawi (16%) and DR Congo (22%), fewer than one person in four has electricity. Which raises the question for the rest of this story: when the grid arrives, what comes with it?

Chapter 3. What travels with the grid

Where there is power, fewer children die.

Across the 91 countries that had less than 90% access in 2000, the more people have electricity, the fewer children die before their fifth birthday. The correlation is strong: −0.76.

Each circle is a country in 2024, sized by population. The line is the best straight fit through them. Hover a circle for its numbers.

And more children finish school.

The same pattern holds for primary school. Where the grid reaches more people, more children complete it. Correlation with access: 0.69.

Completion is a gross rate: it can pass 100% when older pupils or repeaters finish.

Chapter 4. What the grid does not switch on

But the countries that gained power fastest did not get healthier fastest.

Now look at change instead of level. DR Congo went from 7% to 22% access, and child deaths still halved, from 185 to 90 per 1,000 births. Chad went from 3% to 13%, and deaths fell from 182 to 97. Survival improved almost everywhere, with or without the grid.

Correlation between the two changes: −0.29. The shaded corner is where health improved with almost no new power.

Schooling tells the same story.

The countries that added the most access did not add the most primary completion. Correlation between the changes: 0.39, on the 76 countries with completion data at both ends.

Light, health and school travel together. But one does not switch on the others.

Split the 91 countries in half on each change: fast or slow gain in access, fast or slow fall in child deaths. 30 electrified fast and cut child deaths fast. 16 cut child deaths fast with below-median gains in access. Electricity is part of the same development story as clinics, vaccines and schools. It marks that story more than it drives it.

This is association, not cause. Country-level data cannot separate the two. It can rule out the simple version, in which more power automatically means more health.