Conference Agenda

Household cooking energy transitions in rural areas are influenced not only by prices and technology, but also by who makes decisions within the household. This study analyzes cooking fuel choices, fuel-stacking behaviour, and decision-making patterns among 634 smallholder households in Cross River State, Nigeria. Using descriptive statistics, a probit, and a Poisson count model, we assess how fuel use relates to decision authority, forest dependence, and household characteristics. Charcoal remains the dominant primary fuel, while LPG, kerosene, and electricity are typically used as secondary options, revealing widespread fuel stacking rather than full transitions to cleaner energy. Decision-making is largely centralized in the household head, and the likelihood of adopting a clean cookstove increases with the decision-maker's education. Although joint decision-making can support cleaner cooking transitions, it remains uncommon, as most households retain a hierarchical structure in which the head of the household controls energy choices. These results suggest that providing clean stoves alone will not be sufficient to drive meaningful change. Interventions must also address the social and gender dynamics that shape household decisions. Empowering women in household negotiations may matter more than simply providing stoves in clean cooking interventions. Strengthening women’s bargaining power and engaging directly with household heads is crucial for promoting clean cooking transitions in rural Nigeria.

Household energy transitions are occurring rapidly in urban centers in low-income countries but are rarely observed longitudinally. We analyze repeated surveys of 1,462 households (2015-2020) to evaluate changes in use of cooking fuels/stoves in Gisenyi, Rwanda where pellet gasifier stoves and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) were newly available. The pellet stove was prone to dis-adoption and declining use, even though the fuel was relatively cheaper than charcoal. There was rapid and sustained growth in LPG use by wealthier households in our study. Our observations extend current models of initial adoption, sustained use, and dis-adoption, including an unstable, “wobbly” use trajectory.

This paper investigates the impacts of early life exposure to a cooking fuel conversion program in Indonesia that provided cookstoves and cooking fuel subsidies to incentivize households to transition to LPG fuel. Using difference-in-differences and event study analyses, we find improvements in anthropometric measures and cognition among children exposed to the LPG conversion policy within the first five years of life compared to those exposed to the policy later in life. Our findings demonstrate how clean cooking can improve health and human capital, particularly for those exposed during critical periods of development.

Households with sufficient financial means are adopting solar home systems (SHS) to mitigate the impacts of load shedding in Cape Town, leaving lower-income households that are unable to afford the high upfront costs to bear a disproportionate share of the impacts from unreliable electricity connections. In this paper, we investigate whether SHS adoption significantly affects household electricity consumption during load shedding, suggesting that SHS enhances resilience, benefits largely confined to higher-income households. We use panel data on household electricity transactions and load shedding from the City of Cape Town (CCT). In addition, we built our own deep learning model using the Mask2Former infrastructure to identify the locations and capacities of SHS within the city. Our fixed-effects model results indicate that households with SHS generally consume more electricity from the grid but reduce consumption during load shedding, suggesting they smooth their consumption with their backup generation. On the other hand, households without SHS experience no impact on consumption during outages, indicating any consumption that could have been lost is pushed either before or after to compensate. These results show that SHS are effective in improving a household's resilience to unreliable power, but that impacts are most likely concentrated among the wealthier population.

Health systems across sub-Saharan Africa often lack the electricity needed for lighting, medical, diagnostic, and sterilization equipment, and refrigeration. More than one billion people globally rely on facilities with no electricity or a highly unreliable supply. Using survey data, sensor data, and monthly health system records from 303 facilities across three provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we provide estimates of the impact of having sufficient and reliable power on inpatient mortality rates, patient utilization rates, and staffing. Using longitudinal targeted maximum likelihood estimation and two-way fixed effects models, we find that facilities with sufficient and reliable power (>22 hours of power/day) experience a 41% reduction in mortality (a 1.8 percentage point reduction from control facilities, where mortality rates average 4.5%). For a subset of facilities where we measure reliability over time, we find that during months where the uptime >22 hours/day, mortality rates are 1.8 percentage points lower, suggesting that sustaining reliable power is also important. In facilities with reliable power, there is also a 17% increase in the number of outpatients and a 24% increase in the number of days nurses work. Our results underscore the critical role of electricity as a foundational health system input with large impacts on patient survival and service quality, and demonstrate the potential of low-cost survey tools for capturing reliability in data-scarce settings.