Some 1.3 billion people in the world have no access to electricity, while 4.3 million people die each year due to indoor air pollutions triggered by open fires that are used for cooking, a new report said Wednesday.

"We are dealing with massive problem here in terms of energy access globally," Simon Trace, the head of Practical Action, a non-governmental organization, told reporters in New York.

Trace, who launched the Poor People's Energy Outlook report, said that another 1 billion people worldwide had poor access to electricity, while 2.8 billion people were still cooking over open fires.

"Cooking over open fires is responsible for 4.3 million deaths a year from the results of indoor air pollutions," Trace said. Most of the deaths are women and children.

Lack of access to electricity has impacted the educational opportunity for learning as some 50 per cent of the world's children went to schools without electricity in 2012, the report said.

Hundreds of millions of people have gained access to electricity and clean cooking in the past 20 years, Trace said. He called on UN member states to scale up actions to end energy poverty.

Trace was talking on the sidelines of a three-day-forum that began on Wednesday at the UN headquarters. Over a thousand dignitaries, including heads of states, ministers of energy and head of international organizations attended the forum.

The initiative was set by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2011, with the goal of helping developing countries provide access to sustainable energy services to 500 million people by 2030.

The European Union plans to allocate more than 3 billion euro worth of grants in the 2014-2020 financial period to support sustainable energy projects in about 30 countries.

