Women’s decision-making power, cooking fuel adoption and appliance ownership: Evidence from Rwanda, Nepal and Honduras

Universal energy access underpins progress towards achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including gender equality (SDG 5). Yet this link is conditioned by a range of contextual factors that warrant careful consideration in designing measures that guide intervention. In this article, we examine the relationship between women’s decision-making power and household energy choices in Honduras, Nepal and Rwanda. Analysing household and individual data from the World Bank’s Multi-Tier Framework Surveys, we develop a measure to proxy women’s decision-making power within a household and assess how this correlates with cooking fuel choices and appliance ownership. We find that Honduran and Nepalese households are up to 20 and 30 percentage points more likely to use clean cooking fuels when women in the household also experience high levels of decision-making power, but find no such associations in Rwanda. In terms of household appliances, we observe mixed results. In Honduras and Nepal, we find evidence that households with higher women’s decision-making power also own a range of household appliance more often, but there is no general pattern across countries as to which appliances this concerns. In Rwanda, households with higher women’s decision-making power own leisure-related devices less often. These descriptive findings highlight patterns of gender- and context-specific preferences over household energy usage relevant to the measurement of energy access and the development of context-aware energy access improvement interventions.