Off the Grid

Creag

The Boar's Rock
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While most people across the developed world take electricity for granted, quite a few countries are still off the grid. This was graphically illustrated by a famous photograph taken from the International Space Station in January 2014. In one frame, it tells quite a story. It shows the two Koreas at night-time with the south illuminated in light while the north is cloaked in darkness. According to The World Bank, 32 percent of North Korea's population have access to electricity.

As bad as that level of access may seem, there are places where it's even worse. As can be seen from the following infographic, huge parts of Africa have to cope without electricity along with sizeable chunks of the population in several Asian countries including Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea. South Sudan is the country with the worst level of electricity access worldwide - only 4 percent of the population there are connected to the grid. The situation is also poor in Burundi (7 percent) and Chad (8 percent).

Source & link: Statista

chartoftheday_13494_off_the_grid_n.jpg
 
Interesting that Somalia doesn't appear among the bottom 5. Surprised to see Malawi in there. Somali were apparently at about 11.20 at the time of that mapping
 
Being off the grid is okay for a month or two. As long as you have a PowerMonkey to keep your camera charged so that you can take photos to post on Facebook later.

Last time I went to undeveloped bush for work, we had Iridium phones as a health and safety provision. We were also all allowed 50MB of data usage a day, so you can still troll on the internet.

Must be tough to live in those conditions. If you live there, you don't even get the 50MB.
 
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