Energy Access and Economic Development in Nigeria

This study empirically determined the effect of energy access on economic development in Nigeria. The study proxied energy access using access to electricity, electricity consumption per capita, access to clean cooking fuels and technologies, renewable energy access, and rural electrification rate while economic development was proxied by Human Development Index. Annual time series data were utilized and extracted from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletin, the World Development Indicators of the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, the Africa Energy Portal, and the United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report database, from 1990 to 2024. The study adopted the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique as the major data analysis approach. The results revealed that access to electricity, electricity consumption per capita, access to clean cooking fuels and technologies, renewable energy access, and rural electrification rate all have significant positive effects on the Human Development Index in Nigeria in both the short run and long run. The study concluded that energy access plays a vital and multidimensional role in driving economic development in Nigeria. The study recommended that government should treat universal electricity access expansion as a first-order national human development priority and explicitly frame Nigeria's renewable energy transition as a human development imperative.