Determinants of household energy fuel choice in Lesotho

Abstract

The determinants of household energy fuel choice have not been studied in some developing countries, including Lesotho, despite the potential benefits such a study might have for policy design and implementation. This study uses the data collected by Lesotho’s Bureau of Statistics through a national household energy consumption survey of 2017, and a multinomial logistic regression to analyse the determinants of household energy fuel choice in Lesotho. The results indicate that the gender of the household head does not influence the choice of cleaner energy fuels for cooking and water heating. However, the age and education of the household head, household size, level of income, and access to electricity are drivers of energy fuel choice. The older the household head and the larger the household, the less likely it is to adopt cleaner energy fuels. Generally, higher income, access to electricity and a better-educated household head make a household more likely to adopt clean energy fuels. Thus, policies aimed at promoting household income-generating opportunities, effective provision of access to electricity, and investment in education can influence the choice of clean energy use within households. But these policies must be tailored to the unique characteristics of different settlement types, given that the significance of these determinants vary across rural, peri-urban, and urban areas.

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“…This is expected since an increase in education level is likely to raise awareness of the health and environmental effects of using an unclean energy type [94]. However, [28] found results which are contradictory to our findings: upon disaggregation of dwelling types, [28] found that education is not important for the choice of electricity over others, such as traditional fuel for cooking. Note that in our case, the results suggest that higher education decreases electricity use for cooking.…”

“…The estimated results show that household size, dwelling type, high level of education and dependency ratio have significant influence on households' energy choices. These results are consistent with those of Mothala et al [28], who argue that higher income levels, education, and household size are the drivers of energy fuel choice in Lesotho. Thus, policies designed to promote household job creation, effective access to electricity, and investment in education can influence the choice of clean energy use within households.…”

“…Thus, policies designed to promote household job creation, effective access to electricity, and investment in education can influence the choice of clean energy use within households. However, as suggested by [28] that these policies must be tailored to account for the unique characteristics of different dwelling types, this paper concurs, given the varying significance of these drivers across formal dwellings, informal dwellings, and traditional dwelling types.…”

“…Numerous studies have investigated the patterns and drivers of energy fuel use in both emerging and developing countries, such as China, India, and Bhutan [23][24][25][26][27], and Sub-Saharan Africa [26,[28][29][30][31]. They agree that the effect of socio-economic factors, including income, on the choice of energy to be used by households remains an unsettled question.…”

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“…Education influences the decisions of the household to adopt modern energy fuels through the raising of awareness of the dangers of using traditional cooking fuels. This increases the opportunity cost of the collection of traditional fuels for educated household heads (Aryal et al, 2019;Rahut et al, 2019Rahut et al, , 2020Jaiswal and Meshram, 2021;Wall et al, 2021;Mothala et al, 2022). Our study findings were in agreement with the notion above.…”