Energy Access

№ 2026-73 · October 2026 · 22 min

Financing Clean Energy Access in Emerging Economies

Sub-Saharan Africa has 89% of the world's people without electricity but received 28% of international public clean-energy finance in 2015–2024, about $82 per person without power over a decade. Twenty-five 'forgotten frontier' countries with 486 million people without electricity received 7%. Where finance does arrive, capital costs more than twice as much as in rich economies and currencies have lost three quarters of their value, so the price of money becomes the price of power.

№ 2026-37 · October 2026 · 16 min

The Unequal Geography of Human Air Pollution Exposure

The poorest half of humanity breathes 66% of the world's fine-particle exposure above the WHO guideline. Exposure peaks not in the poorest countries but in lower-middle-income ones, where industry, dense cities and solid-fuel cooking coincide: their population-weighted average is 42.5 µg/m³, against 12.5 in high-income countries. Since 2010 three in four high-income countries have cleaned their air, against fewer than half of lower-middle-income ones.