Households In Rural Kenya Research Articles

Biogas technology for rural households in Kenya

Biogas technology for rural households in Kenya

96/03436 - Energy consumption in three rural Kenyan households: A survey

96/03436 - Energy consumption in three rural Kenyan households: A survey

Energy consumption in three rural Kenyan households: A survey

Woodfuel is an important source of fuel energy in Kenya, constituting about 75% of the total energy consumed. The rural population relies almost entirely on fuelwood which has become increasingly difficult to obtain. In this study a questionnaire was used to establish the form and quantity of fuel used and the types of stoves used in rural households within Nyeri, Wanguru in Embu and Muhoroni in Kisumu. Forty households in Nyeri and 30 in each of the other two areas were randomly selected for the study. The availability of agricultural residues for use as fuel and the possibility of using briquettes for cooking were established. It was found that all the households have a 3-stone cooking stove in which they burn fuelwood or agricultural residues. Cowdung is used in Embu but not in Nyeri and Kisumu. The degree to which the population relies on agricultural residues for fuel varies among the villages. In Nyeri, most of the agricultural residues are either fed to cattle or left in the field. In Embu only a few of the houses use maize cobs and stalks. However, the rural population in Muhoroni rely heavily on sugarcane residues for their cooking fuel. In general, 15–35% of a household's income is spent on fuel though this does not take into account the time spent gathering fuel.

Consistent Estimation of Expenditure Elasticities from Cross-Section Data on Households Producing Partly for Subsistence

JN estimating Engel curves, it is common to use total expenditure in place of income as an explanatory variable. Summers [6] has shown that least-squares estimators will then be inconsistent. More recently, Liviatan [4] has shown that using income as an instrumental variable will permit consistent and relatively efficient estimation of the expenditure elasticities. However, when the sample consists of households in a less-developed country (LDC) that produce partly for subsistence, there are further sources of bias. Estimates may be asymptotically biased because of the spread between the buying and selling price of many food items in a partial subsistence economy; a household that is a net buyer of an item is confronted with a higher effective price than a household that is a net seller. Also, the arbitrary valuation of home-produced goods introduces possibly serious errors of observation with respect to both the regressand and regressor, resulting in the usual errors-in-variables bias. This paper discusses these sources of bias, presents a method for obtaining consistent estimates of the parameters in the Engel relationship, and applies the method to a sample of 816 households in rural Kenya.'