Tackling energy poverty: Do clean fuels for cooking and access to electricity improve or worsen health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa?

Abstract

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries continue to suffer from energy poverty, with 35 % and 19 % of the average population, having access to electricity and clean fuels for cooking technologies, respectively. This study examines whether access to electricity and clean fuels for cooking and technology improves or worsens health outcomes (i.e. infant, child and maternal mortality) in 48 sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to 2020. We applied panel quantile regression to estimate the impact of access to electricity, and clean fuels for cooking on health outcomes while controlling for health care expenditure and income, using lagged explanatory variables as instruments to eliminate endogeneity. To ensure the robustness of the results, we also employed the Kernel-based Regularized Least Squares (KRLS), a machine learning technique. Our results show that access to electricity reduce infant, child, and maternal mortality across all quantiles (i.e., the 25th, 50th, 60th, 75th and 90th). Similarly, clean fuels for cooking and technologies reduce maternal, infant and child mortality to most quantiles. This indicates that increased access to electricity, clean fuels for cooking and technologies will have a significant impact on reducing child, infant and maternal mortality in SSA. The findings also reveal that clean fuels for cooking and technologies increase both infant and under-five mortality in certain quantiles. This is likely due to the fact that cooking is also a leading cause of house fires, killing both infants and children under the age of five. Therefore, it is crucial to prioritize home cooking safety measures to prevent unnecessary deaths of infants and children. Our study suggests short-and long-term energy policies to address energy poverty and ultimately improve population health in SSA.