Energy access, time use, and women’s empowerment in low- and middle-income countries

Jeuland, Marc

Pattanayak, Subhrendu

Chandrasekaran, Maya Parvathi

2024-06-06T13:44:33Z

2024-06-06T13:44:33Z

2024

Environmental Policy

This dissertation examines aspects of the relationship between improved energy access,both in terms of cooking energy and electricity access, and women’s time use patterns, labor productivity, and empowerment in low- and middle-income countries. The first chapter of this dissertation examines the relationship between women’s empowerment and various measures of cooking energy and electricity access across 7 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia using the multi-tiered framework datasets from the World Bank. Since there are many potential facets to women’s empowerment, for example, social standing (i.e., ability to participate in community groups, ability to move freely), employment, or education levels, we use principal component analysis to create an “empowerment index” that captures multiple aspects of women’s empowerment as a singular value. We then use simple regression analysis to study the correlation between women’s empowerment and energy access measures. We find positive associations between empowerment and measures of energy access, though this pattern is not consistent across all countries and contexts.

After descriptively establishing a positive relationship between women’s empowermentand improved cooking energy access, especially in Sub-Saharan African contexts, the second chapter of this dissertation describes an impact evaluation of an improved cookstove distributed in Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia. We used a quasi-experimental design to survey approximately 3,000 households across three countries, looking for impacts on women’s time use patterns and labor productivity as a result of take up of the improved cookstove. Using a difference-indifferences approach, we find that in most contexts, this improved cookstove intervention does not result in changes to time use patterns, labor productivity, or time use agency, though the lack of positive impacts may be due to sample contamination, too short of a time frame between stove installation and endline surveys, or reporting errors in modules where time use data is collected.

In order to understand these results in the context of prior published evidence of timesavings from improved cookstoves, in the third chapter, we investigate the population and study characteristics that may impact the time saved in fuel collection as a result of the distributed improved cookstove. Specifically, we apply Bayesian linear regression modeling and Bayesian model comparison to investigate whether and how methodological and contextual choices, such as geography, level of remoteness of a region, fuel use behaviors, the type of time use elicitation method used, and respondent characteristics affect estimates of time savings in fuel collection derived from the cookstove distributed in Chapter 2. Our prior is constructed from 34 estimates of time savings from the improved cookstove literature, while our sampling data is provided by the quasi-experiment in Chapter 2. The approach provides insight on how different sources of variation impact time savings estimates and allows us to make predictions of potential time savings in new settings. Results suggest that the potential for time savings from this improved cookstove is highest in poorer, less educated populations.

In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature by first describing the relationshipsbetween forms of energy access, including improved cooking technologies, and women’s empowerment, and describing those patterns across countries. I then test this relationship using quasi-experimental methods to find causal impacts of improved cooking technologies on outcomes pertinent to women’s livelihoods, including women’s time use patterns, across four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, I provide insight into how population and study characteristics impact time savings results from improved cooking technologies, and in what contexts we might find maximum impact.

https://hdl.handle.net/10161/30841

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Environmental economics

Development

Energy

Gender

Impact evaluation

Sub-Saharan Africa

Time use

Energy access, time use, and women’s empowerment in low- and middle-income countries

Dissertation