Universal access to modern energy services, in terms of access to electricity and to modern cooking facilities, has been recognized as a fundamental challenge for development. Despite strong praise for action and the deployment of large-scale electrification programs and improved cookstove (ICS) distribution campaigns, few studies have shed light on the barriers to, the enablers of and the impacts of access to energy on development outcomes, using rigorous methodologies. This paper reviews this recent strand of research, trying to fill these gaps. We focus on the demand-side and household perspective. Our main outcomes of interest are electricity connection and ICS adoption for the analysis of barriers, time allocation, labour market outcomes and welfare for the impact analysis. We provide evidence of significant wellbeing impacts of electrification, and mixed evidence for cookstoves.JEL classification: O1, O13, Q4, Q48
Inclusion in the sample is based exclusively on technical eligibility criteria set by the utility: households must have a valid name and email address as of June 2016, live in single-family homes, have at least one year of valid pre-experiment energy consumption data, have no negative electricity meter reads, at least one meter read in the previous three months, no significant gaps nor extreme peaks in usage history, and exactly one account per customer per location. While these criteria may result in the study sample not being perfectly representative of the full sample of utility customers, no self-selection in the study is present.
Mutual health organisations have been present in Senegal for years. Despite their benefits, in most areas take-up rates remain low. Using randomised controlled trials, we evaluate the effect of an insurance literacy module, communicating the benefits and functioning of health microinsurance, as well as three cross-cutting marketing treatments. The results from our various marketing treatments indicate a positive and significant effect on health insurance adoption, particularly for poor households, increasing take-up by around 35-40%. The insurance literacy module does not seem to have a positive impact on take-up decisions. We attempt to provide different contextual reasons for this result.
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