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Definition: Access to Electricity

What does it mean to have ‘access to electricity’? How is this measured?

Access to electricity is widely-used and important metric to understand what share of the population have access to modern energy.

But what does it mean to have 'access to electricity? What criteria must be met for someone to count as having access?

What does it mean to have access to electricity?

The United Nations adopts the World Bank's Multi-Tier approach to electrification. This approach measures electricity access and consumption from Tier 1 (the lowest level of access) to Tier 5 (the highest level of access). The five tiers are detailed in the next section.

Tier 0 means a household has no access to electricity.

To pass the basic binary threshold of 'having access to electricity' a household must meet the criteria of Tier 1.

This means having a source of electricity in the household for which a family can afford electricity to power very basic appliances. It equates to approximately 22 kilowatt-hours of power per person per year. This is only enough to provide a very basic light – such as a light at night for reading – and enough to charge a mobile phone.

What this makes clear is that meeting the criteria for electricity access does not necessarily mean that an individual can afford electricity for basic household appliances such as a refrigerator, washing machine, television, or heating. It is a very low threshold.

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Five tiers of electrification

The World Bank defines five tiers of electrification. Tier 0 means a household does not have access to electricity. Below we have listed some of the basic criteria for each tier.1 These are also shown in the graphic. Full criteria are available here.

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 5

How is electricity access measured?

The World Bank’s Global Electrification Database compiles nationally representative household survey data plus census data to estimate rates of electricity access. This database is supplemented with data from the Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa Poverty Database, and the Europe and Central Asia Poverty Database, all of which are based on similar surveys.

Surveys are usually published every two to three years. However, for some regions these household surveys are even more infrequent.

To fill these data gaps, researchers estimate access basic on a modeling approach developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). This means that when a country is missing a data point for a given year due to a lack of surveys, a modeled estimate is used based on the country's historical trend plus an evaluation of regional trends.

Endnotes

  1. These basic criteria come from the energy scenarios laid out by the United Nations here. and the. World Bank's electrification methodology here.

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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as:

Hannah Ritchie (2021) - “Definition: Access to Electricity” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/definition-electricity-access' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owid-definition-electricity-access,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie},
    title = {Definition: Access to Electricity},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2021},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/definition-electricity-access}
}
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