30 May 2023, the newest Nature publishes the correspondence by Prof. Fengting Li and the team, entitled Electricity outages delay SDGs in sub-Saharan Africa (Nature 2023; 618; 30). The correspondence indicates that, with less than 7 years to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), sub-Saharan Africa is significantly falling behind, due to poor electricity access and longer, increasingly frequent outages.  Moreover, stable power supply is not specified in SDG 7 despite affects almost all SDGs.

Countries reply mostly on hydropower, like Kenya, Zimbabwe and Zambia, are facing more climate-induced interruptions, including flooding, drought and cyclone. Fossil fuel-powered countries are no better. Outage in South Africa becomes constant and worse since 2011, almost to a daily normality now.

The paper calls for a tailored and resilient energy-supply plan for sub-Saharan Africa, in order to be on the track for the 2030 Agenda.

Paper link：https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01757-9