Determinants of household biogas sustainability in North Shewa Zone Oromia Ethiopia using multinomial logit analysis

Household biogas technology offers a promising renewable-energy pathway for expanding access to clean household energy, reducing dependence on traditional biomass, improving environmental sustainability, and supporting rural livelihoods. However, the sustained functionality of installed systems is constrained by interacting household, socioeconomic, technical, environmental, and institutional factors, while empirical evidence on biogas sustainability in Ethiopia remains limited. This study assessed factors associated with the sustainability of household biogas systems among 200 biogas-adopting households in North Shewa Zone, Oromia Region, Ethiopia. Data were collected through structured household interviews, key-informant interviews, and field observations. Systems were categorized as sustainable, moderately sustainable, or unsustainable. A multinomial logit model was employed to examine associations between household characteristics, resource availability, technical management, climatic conditions, institutional factors, and sustainability status. Average marginal effects were estimated to facilitate substantive interpretation of these associations. The overall model was statistically significant (likelihood-ratio test, p < 0.001). Financial resources showed the largest positive association with sustainable operation, increasing its predicted probability by 10.0 percentage points, followed by feedstock availability (9.0), system maintenance (8.0), education (7.0), livestock availability (6.0), favorable climatic conditions (5.0), and household age (4.5). Policy instability reduced the predicted probability by 3.5 percentage points. The findings demonstrate that biogas sustainability is multidimensional and closely linked to household resource capacity, feedstock availability, maintenance, and environmental and institutional conditions. Post-installation technical support, spare-parts and repair services, appropriate financing, user training, reliable feedstock and water supplies, climate-responsive operation, and institutional continuity are therefore essential for sustaining household biogas systems in North Shewa and comparable rural areas of Ethiopia.