Energy poverty, environmental degradation and agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT Agricultural productivity remains pivotal to the sustenance of the economies and livelihoods of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries. Given the emerging threat of energy and environmental uncertainties globally, this study makes a foray into understanding the link among energy poverty, environmental degradation and agricultural productivity in 35 SSA nations in particular, and the nature of their impacts across the sub-region constituents namely; the Central, Eastern, Western and Southern sub-regional blocs in general. To begin, our identified variables comprised of the following: Energy Poverty Index, derived using the principal component analysis, agricultural value added as a share of GDP served as a measure of agricultural productivity and ecological footprint to represent environmental degradation. Subsequently, the instrumental variable generalized method of moment (IV‐GMM) technique was implemented for the aggregate SSA model, while the IV-two stage least square technique was adopted for the sub-regional estimations for the Central, East, West and South African blocs respectively. Major findings from the SSA model revealed that whereas the index of energy poverty has a significant positive influence, ecological footprint exhibited an inverse and significant impact on agricultural productivity, while the Central, East, West and South African models yielded mixed results given regional disparities in economic development, regional variations in agricultural productivity and an imbalance of available resources. Policy recommendations were suggested to, among other things, transform the energy, environmental and agricultural fortunes of the region. KEYPOLICY HIGHLIGHTS Aggregate energy poverty index has a significant positive influence on agricultural productivity in SSA. Components of energy poverty influences agricultural productivity in SSA as follows: rural electrification (positive and significant), access to clean fuels, RE consumption, and RE output (significant negative), national electricity access and urban electrification (EP2) (no significant influence). Rise in pollution (Ecological footprint) hampers the productivity of the agricultural sector in SSA. Energy poverty index and agricultural productivity have the following relationship in the sub-regional SSA blocs: Central Africa (no significant impact), East Africa (positive and significant), Southern Africa (negative but insignificant) and West Africa (positive but insignificant). Ecological footprint and agricultural productivity have the following relationship in the sub-regional SSA blocs: significantly reduces the productivity of agriculture in the Central African region, significantly stimulates agricultural productivity in the Eastern African region, Southern Africa reveals a mixed result, pollution via environmental degradation hampers the productivity of the agricultural sector in West Africa.