East African countries have made big strides in getting electric power to their people

The world is moving too slowly to meet targets to provide electric power and clean cooking to everyone on the planet by 2030, with progress on using less-polluting fuels in the kitchen especially the poor, international agencies said.

The Energy Progress Report, released at a two-day forum in Lisbon tackling how to meet the targets, highlighted that some countries - particularly in East Africa - have made big strides in getting electric power to their people in recent years.

Vivien Foster, global lead for energy economics with the World Bank, noted that in sub-Saharan Africa the number of people living without electricity had begun to fall for the first time in history.

Previously, efforts to add power capacity were not able to keep up with population growth. "This has finally reversed, and we think it may be a turning point for electrification on the continent," Foster told reporters.

Progress has been fuelled by a jump in off-grid solar power, driven by a rise in 'pay-as-you-go' systems in countries such as Kenya and Tanzania, where users can make payments via mobile phones.

The number of people living without electricity in 2016 was a billion, or 13 per cent of the global population, with the vast majority in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, new data released by the World Bank, the UN, and other organisations showed.

Unless efforts to get power to hard-to-reach areas are ramped up, an estimated 674 million people - about eight per cent of the world's population - will still live without electricity in 2030, they said in a report.

In 2016, three billion people - more than 40 per cent of the world's population - did not have access to clean fuels and technologies for cooking.