Gender, Energy Expenditure and Household Cooking Fuel Choice in Nigeria.

• Date: 01 September 2023
• Author: Dim, Jennifer Uju

1. INTRODUCTION

   Household air pollution is one of the major causes of premature deaths in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization, about 3 billion people globally still rely on traditional fuels (e.g., wood, crop wastes, animal dung) to meet basic energy needs. The reliance on traditional fuels and the use of open fires and inefficient stoves produce high levels of health-damaging pollutants such as particulate matter, methane, carbon monoxide and poly-aromatic hydrocarbons. Exposure to these pollutants is exceptionally high among women and children in developing countries who are responsible for household cooking (WHO 2016). These negative impacts of traditional fuel use emphasize the importance of the gender dimension for the household energy transition to modern fuels (e.g., LPG, electricity).

   Women and children in developing countries disproportionately suffer from the adverse effects of using traditional fuels because of several societal and cultural factors. Gender norms typically assign women and children the role of collecting firewood from the forests. Firewood collection is time-consuming and requires physical effort for cutting, gathering and transporting the firewood back home. The daily tasks of collecting, processing and using firewood leave women and children with little to no time for rest, leisure, or education (Kohlin et al. 2011; WHO 2016). Women in developing countries usually have lower status than their spouses, so their preferences are not always accounted for in household decisions. The adoption of improved cooking technologies depends on the household decision-making process, particularly the extent to which women's preferences, opportunity cost of time, and well-being are reflected in the decision-making process.

   Against this backdrop, this paper examines women's bargaining power in intra-household decision-making for household fuel choice. In particular, it provides a better understanding of the need for women's participation in the household decision-making process. Studying this has meaningful policy implications and contributes to the growing literature on energy and gender. This paper conjectures that households where women have some authority, are more likely to adopt modern cooking fuels than those without. This is because the adoption of modern fuels directly improves the welfare of women in terms of better health outcomes and reduced cooking time.

   The household decision of which fuel to adopt is not the only important aspect of energy transition from traditional to modern fuels. Understanding the determinants of household energy spending is also crucial in designing effective modern energy transition policies. For instance, households where a large fraction of their income is spent on modern fuels will have a lower purchasing power for other consumption goods, thereby reducing overall welfare. Considering this, this article further investigates the determinants of household energy expenditure once the decision to use a given fuel has been made. This is also crucial because the factors determining household fuel choice may be different from those that influence energy spending (Adusah-Poku and Takeuchi 2019).

   Moreover, the allocative decision of distributing a limited energy budget among different fuel types is vital for healthy and productive outcomes for households. If households spend their income on modern fuels rather than traditional fuels, they can enjoy the benefits that accrue from modern fuel usage. Some of these benefits identified in the literature include improved health, reduced cooking time and more time for leisure/education and improvements in overall productivity (Kohlin et al. 2011; Pachauri and Rao 2013; WHO 2016).

   Household energy transition is rooted in the energy ladder theory, which postulates that as income increases, households switch from traditional fuels to modern and more efficient fuels (Hosier and Dowd 1987; Lay et al. 2013; van der Kroon et al. 2013). The energy ladder model suggests three fuel switching phases. The first phase involves the sole use of traditional fuels such as biomass. In the second phase, households move from the use of traditional to transition fuels such as kerosene and charcoal. In the third and final phase, households use modern fuels such as LPG and electricity exclusively. However, other studies have found contrary evidence which reveals that households in developing countries do not entirely switch to a new phase but use a combination of fuels simultaneously from different stages of the energy ladder (Masera et al. 2000: Hanna and Oliva 2015).

   Several empirical studies have evaluated the effects of gender on household energy choice. However, the findings from these studies have been contradictory. While some studies find evidence that female-headed households prefer modern fuels to traditional fuels (Israel 2002; Farsi et al. 2007; Wickramasinghe 2011; Rahut et al. 2014; Karimu et al. 2016; Mohapatra and Simon 2017; Gould and Urpelainen 2019), others find that the gender of the household head does not determine household fuel choice (An et al. 2002; Ouedraogo 2006). The relationship between gender and household fuel choice is context-specific and depends on geographical variation across countries (Schunder and Bagchi-Sen 2019). Hence, the results of other studies do not apply directly to the Nigerian context.

   A review of the existing literature on women's well-being and energy poverty by Pachauri and Rao (2013) finds that more research and empirical evidence are needed to understand the factors that influence women's decision-making power in terms of modern energy adoption. Miller and Mobarak (2013) used a randomized controlled trial to study gender and the intra-household dimension of decision making related to improved stove adoption. They find that although women have a stronger preference for improved stoves than men, they do not purchase the stove because of their low decision-making authority within the household. This study uses several proxies for women's household decision-making power to contribute new insights to this research area.

   With regards to fuel expenditure, a review of the existing literature reveals that only a few papers have tried to study the factors that affect household energy spending in developing countries (Khandker et al. 2012; Alkon et al. 2016; Mottaleb et al. 2017; Adusah-Poku and Takeuchi 2019). This study makes two significant contributions to the existing literature. First, it focuses on Nigeria, where almost two-thirds of the population rely on traditional fuels as the primary energy source for cooking. Since many Nigerian households are yet to adopt modern cooking fuels, there is a need to understand to what extent gender influences fuel choice in Nigeria to inform energy transition policies. Therefore, the study provides nationwide evidence for the Nigerian situation. Second, unlike most studies in the literature, this paper not only examines the impact of women's intra-household bargaining power but also studies household energy spending behavior after choosing a particular fuel.

   The study's findings have some implications. First, households where women have strong bargaining power are less likely to choose traditional fuels and more likely to opt for modern fuels as their main cooking fuel. This implies that policies that enhance women's participation and influence in household decision-making would promote the adoption of modern cooking fuels. Second, income is an essential determinant of household modern energy use and expenditure. Thus, there is a need to design policies that ensure the affordability of modern fuels for low-income households. Third, the findings reveal that education is essential for modern fuel adoption. Investments in educating household heads would improve incentives for clean household energy transition.

   This paper comprises five sections. Section 2 presents the methodology used in this study. Section 3 describes the data and discusses household energy use patterns in Nigeria. Section 4 reports and interprets the estimation results. Lastly, section 5 concludes the paper.

2. METHODOLOGY

   The empirical analysis used in this study is presented in two steps. The first step uses a discrete choice modeling technique to examine the impact of household characteristics, most especially women's intra-household bargaining power, on fuel choices. The second step uses a log-linear regression approach to understand the factors affecting household energy expenditure once the decision to use a particular fuel has been made. The idea for the estimation is derived from the two-part model approach (Cragg 1971). The two-part model has two equations. The first equation is a probit equation that models whether or not a household uses a particular fuel. In contrast, the second equation is a linear log model to determine the factors affecting energy expenditure for a sub-sample of households with positive expenditure levels. The sub-sample is used to overcome the problem of zero observations which is common in expenditure datasets. Given that there are multiple cooking fuel options in Nigeria, a multinomial model is employed instead of the probit model to determine the probability that a household chooses a given fuel.

   2.1 Discrete Choice Model

   Households choose among different cooking fuels based on their preferences and characteristics to maximize utility. There are various discrete choice models which are applicable depending on whether the choice set is ordered or unordered. Since cooking fuel types have no intrinsic ordering, households face an unordered multinomial fuel choice. Two models--multinomial logit and multinomial probit--are usually considered to model unordered choice sets. The multinomial probit model is computationally burdensome because of the need to evaluate multiple integrals of the normal distribution (Greene...