Abstract

Abstract

Solar lanterns are promoted across rural Sub-Saharan Africa to improve both lighting in homes and educational outcomes. We undertake a randomized controlled trial in Zimba District, Zambia, to evaluate whether solar lanterns help children study more effectively and improve academic performance. Our research design accounts for potential income effects arising from the giveaways of lanterns and also “blinds” participants to the study’s purpose. We find no evidence that receipt of a lantern improved performance on important national examinations (even though an ex poststatistical power analysis demonstrates that the research should detect economically significant impacts, if present). We also do not observe impacts on self-reported study habits. Several features of Zimba District that are likely to exist in other developing regions appear to drive our results. First, flashlights are the dominant lighting source in rural Zambia rather than traditional options like kerosene lamps or candles. In such environments, solar lights may hold only limited appeal for prospective users. Second, our survey data suggests that other major barriers to educational attainment likely render improved energy access (whether through solar lanterns or otherwise) a relatively unimportant educational input. 

Policies that promote biofuels in major agricultural economies raise important questions for food prices and food security at local to global scales. Global biofuel output rose from 38 billion liters to 131 billion liters between 2005 and 2015, boosting the demand for annual- and perennial-crop feedstocks such as maize, sugar, soy, rapeseed, and palm oil. Although ethanol volume was three times that of biodiesel in 2015, the share of biodiesel in total biofuel output rose from 10% to almost 25% over the course of the decade (EIA, n.d.; REN21, 2016). Biodiesel production increased 700% between 2005 and 2015 and is expected to rise by another 35% by 2025 (OECD/FAO, 2014). In this paper, we examine the linkages between biodiesel, oil crop, and energy markets, and ask: What are the food security implications of biodiesel policies in major agricultural economies? How do governments adjust biodiesel policies in response to international commodity prices, trade opportunities, and their changing economic and environmental priorities?

Although development organizations agree that reliable access to energy and energy services—one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals—is likely to have profound and perhaps disproportionate impacts on women, few studies have directly empirically estimated the impact of energy access on women's empowerment. This is a result of both a relative dearth of energy access evaluations in general and a lack of clarity on how to quantify gender impacts of development projects. Here we present an evaluation of the impacts of the Solar Market Garden—a distributed photovoltaic irrigation project—on the level and structure of women's empowerment in Benin, West Africa. We use a quasi-experimental design (matched-pair villages) to estimate changes in empowerment for project beneficiaries after one year of Solar Market Garden production relative to non-beneficiaries in both treatment and comparison villages (n = 771). To create an empowerment metric, we constructed a set of general questions based on existing theories of empowerment, and then used latent variable analysis to understand the underlying structure of empowerment locally. We repeated this analysis at follow-up to understand whether the structure of empowerment had changed over time, and then measured changes in both the levels and likelihood of empowerment over time. We show that the Solar Market Garden significantly positively impacted women's empowerment, particularly through the domain of economic independence. In addition to providing rigorous evidence for the impact of a rural renewable energy project on women's empowerment, our work lays out a methodology that can be used in the future to benchmark the gender impacts of energy projects.