Impact Analysis of Rural Electrification Projects in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Tanguy Bernard. 2012

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The author reviews trends in rural electrification over the past 30 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, it is shown that motivations for rural electrification programs have evolved significantly over the years, following changes in development paradigms. The author finds, that knowledge of the impact of this has only marginally improved: low connection rates and weak productive utilization identified in the 1980s remain true today, and impacts on such dimensions as health, education, or income, though often used to justify projects, are largely undocumented. Indeed impact evaluations are methodologically challenging in the field of infrastructures and have been limited thus far. Nevertheless examples of recent or ongoing impact evaluations of rural electrification programs offer promising avenues for identifying both the effect of electricity per se and the relative effectiveness of approaches to promoting it.

Subfields: Development, Pollution, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67c70e5e717939af99a2a1e1a44dd866a405e4f3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Development

In Pollution

In Safety Research

Citations in the corpus

Long-term Gains from Electrification in Rural India (2015, methodology): “Similarly, Bernard (2010, 41) writes that “While funding for rural electrification programs often rests on their supposed impacts on such outcomes as health, education, or poverty level, there is still very little empirical evidence to substantiate them.””
Household electrification and indoor air pollution (2017, unknown): “…have usually been justified on the assumed benefits of electrification on health, education, and income, but most of the empirical evidence on which these claims are based is weak (Bernard, 2012; Independent Evaluation Group, 2008), and the more recent literature shows mixed results.”
Demand for Off-Grid Solar Electricity: Experimental Evidence from Rwanda (2020, unknown): “For Africa, in contrast, it is less clear whether electrification triggers massive economic development (Bernard 2012; Chaplin et al. 2017; Dinkelman 2011; Lee et al. 2018; Lenz et al. 2017; Peters and Sievert 2016).”
Access to modern energy: a review of barriers, drivers and impacts (2016, background): “The first and most widespread electric appliance adopted in newly electrified contexts is lighting, particularly in remote areas (Barnes, 2007; Bensch et al., 2011; Bernard, 2012).”
Access to electricity in Small Island Developing States of the Pacific: Issues and challenges (2014, background): “It is widely acknowledged that access to electricity is welfare enhancing, although evaluation can be difficult due to attribution problems [17].”