Measuring the Impacts of the Ethiopian Rural Electrification Program Through Gender Perspective

Abstract

The issue of gender is getting more and more attention leading to the extent of changing development policies and strategies. Among the many current interventions, energy policy making and planning at community, national and international levels are critical agendas where gender-energy nexus started to receive attention. However, the literature on evaluation of impacts of rural electrification (RE) programs risks underestimating benefits because of its focus on easily measurable outcomes (e.g. income) and shorter time frames than required to observe final impacts and lacks consideration of gender-differentiated impacts. Hence, this paper was interested to address two research questions in Eastern Gojjam, Northern Ethiopia. The first one was concerned with measuring the impact of RE on educational status of women measured in terms of the girls’ study time at home. The second one was meant to address how RE impacts women’s empowerment measured in terms of their participation in household decision and public affairs and their levels of control over household resources. Propensity score matching (PSM) approach with the Kernel-weighted matching technique was used to estimate impacts of RE on the aforementioned variables which was corroborated by propensity score weighted multivariate regression. Results of both approaches indicated that RE significantly and positively impacts girls’ study time at home while RE’s impacts on women empowerment could not be verified with our data. Results of this study should be taken as learning foot prints so that large scale studies could be conducted towards developing a comprehensive energy-gender nexus framework at macro scale.