The impact of conflict on energy poverty: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

This study uses the actual number of fatalities and the influx of refugees as proxies for conflict to empirically investigate the impact of violent events on energy poverty in SSA over 30 years from 1990 to 2019. The research aims to gain valuable insights into the conflict-energy poverty nexus in SSA, where both miseries are widespread and hindering the region's socio-economic development. These insights will assist in identifying policy directions necessary for eradicating energy poverty, in line with the United Nations' SDG-7 goals. The study achieves this by controlling for factors such as GDP, trade, oil rents, exchange rate, electricity losses and institutional quality. To ensure the robustness of our analysis, we applied different econometric techniques comprising fixed effects, Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) and quantile regression estimations to investigate the relationship between conflict fatalities and electricity poverty. All the different panel data models consistently show conflict fatalities to have a detrimental effect on electricity consumption, production, and access rates. The fixed effects quantile regression analysis also reveals a disparate impact of conflict fatalities on electricity consumption and production depending on a country's energy poverty level. There is a progressive increase in the coefficients as energy poverty levels reduce, indicating that countries making appreciable progress in addressing electricity poverty are more at risk of faltering if conflict breaks out. However, replacing fatalities with the number of refugees in a host country as the proxy for conflict results in higher electricity access rates.