Women's decision-making power, cooking fuel adoption and appliance ownership: Evidence from Rwanda, Nepal and Honduras
Women's decision-making power is associated with cleaner cooking in Honduras and Nepal, not Rwanda
Read the published paper ↗doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103780
We examine how women's decision-making power within a household relates to cooking-fuel choices and appliance ownership in Honduras, Nepal and Rwanda. Using household and individual data from the World Bank's Multi-Tier Framework Surveys, we develop a measure to proxy 'women's decision-making power' and assess how it correlates with these energy choices.
We find that Honduran and Nepalese households are up to 20 and 30 percentage points more likely to use clean cooking fuels where women experience high decision-making power, but find no such association in Rwanda. Results for appliance ownership are more mixed. In Honduras and Nepal, households with higher women's decision-making power own a range of appliances more often, though which appliances differs by country. In Rwanda, these households own leisure-related devices less often.
These descriptive findings point to gender- and context-specific preferences over household energy use. This matters for how energy access is measured and for designing context-aware interventions.
@article{flechtner_womens_2024,
title = {Women’s decision-making power, cooking fuel adoption and appliance ownership: {Evidence} from {Rwanda}, {Nepal} and {Honduras}},
volume = {118},
copyright = {All rights reserved},
issn = {22146296},
shorttitle = {Women’s decision-making power, cooking fuel adoption and appliance ownership},
url = {https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S2214629624003712},
doi = {10.1016/j.erss.2024.103780},
language = {en},
urldate = {2024-10-22},
journal = {Energy Research \& Social Science},
author = {Flechtner, Svenja and Lich, Ulli and Pelz, Setu},
month = dec,
year = {2024},
pages = {103780},
}