Electrification, clean cooking technologies and gender inequality: policy insight from Sub-Saharan Africa

One of the key recommendations from the International Energy Agency Global Commission on People-Centred Clean Energy Transitions meeting is to integrate gender, equality, and social considerations into energy transition policies. The majority of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) currently lacks access to clean, modern and reliable energy, prompting numerous policies aimed at improving universal energy access in the region. SSA's energy access deficit disproportionately impacts women, many of whom spend substantial productive hours on unpaid tasks like searching for and collecting firewood. This study investigates whether universal access to clean, modern, and reliable energy fosters gender equality in SSA. In particular, the analysis focuses on electrification and clean cooking technologies' impact on gender inequality, using data from 41 SSA countries spanning 2000 to 2022. The findings based on the Panel Corrected Standard Error model reveal that electrification and clean cooking technologies contribute significantly to decreasing gender inequality in SSA. These results remain consistent across income groups and are robust when addressing endogeneity with Lewbel's two-stage least squares estimator and accounting for distributional heterogeneity via the method of moment quantile regression. The policy implication of our findings is that energy policies that support universal energy accessibility could effectively promote gender equality in SSA.