WINTER 2016
Random Access
By Jessica Pothering
Kenya’ s vast rural landscape tells a misleading story about energy access across the country. Power transmission towers can be spotted in even the most remote areas and found within one kilometer of 70 percent of Kenyan households. Yet only five percent of rural residents— who constitute the majority of Kenya’ s 44 million people— have electricity. This is likely because the cost of a household power connection is prohibitively high for most rural families: about US $ 400 per home. As a result, most village homes go dark once the sun goes down.
Alleviation of so-called“ energy poverty” is a key focus in the field of international development. But while it is generally accepted that access to power yields positive social and economic results, concrete evidence is sparse.
“ We actually know very little about the impacts of energy access, and whether there are in fact large welfare gains from these versus other types of community investments,” says Ken Lee, a graduate researcher with the University of California, Berkeley’ s Center for Effective Global Action( CEGA).
Few studies have sought to examine the relationship between infrastructure development and social and economic wellbeing. This is surprising, given the enormous public and private investment in infrastructure. For example, in 2014, the World Bank spent $ 24.2 billion on infrastructure, which typically accounts for 30 to 40 percent of its total commitments.
For the last three years, a team of researchers from Berkeley’ s Development Impact Lab have been working to shed light on that question. The Lab, which is funded by USAID, develops multidisciplinary projects to improve development impact. Its team in Kenya, which includes Lee, has partnered with a Kenyan government agency on a large randomized study to determine the costs and benefits of expanding energy services to remote areas.
“ We hope to show, with rigorous impact evaluation, whether there are quantifiable positive effects of connecting people to the electricity grid,” explains Matt
The Rural Electric Power Project( REPP) Team with their collaborators, Innovations for Poverty Action Kenya, during a recent field visit.( Photo Credit: Innovations for Poverty Action)
Podolsky, an engineer who serves as a technical expert on the project from Berkeley’ s Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions( TIER) group.“ It’ s not necessarily a unique idea, but having this kind of evidence would be useful for influencing public investments.”
It may not be a new idea, but it is a relatively untested one: Berkeley’ s so-called“ Rural Electric Power Project” in Kenya is one of a very small number of randomized studies on infrastructure development.
The Research Challenge Randomized controlled trials— commonly called RCTs— set the gold standard for empirical analysis because of their rigor and objectivity. But while they have become the norm in fields like drug and medical device testing, experts acknowledge that it is difficult to execute RCTs for infrastructure because of the difficulty identifying counterfactuals. In the scope of electricity projects, this means trying to estimate how households with electricity would have fared if they did not have electricity.
“ One way to deal with this counterfactual is to make electricity available in a randomized fashion and then observe how households similar in all characteristics except electricity compare with one another,” notes a 2009 World Bank study on rural electrification in Bangladesh. This is not how grid expansion projects are typically planned, however.“ In order to be financially viable, electricity [ projects ] generally follow a plan to reach more developed and densely populated communities before more remote areas,” the report explains. This highlights why in Kenya, for example, urban electrification( 65 percent) far outpaces rural electrification( 5 percent), even when a larger share of the population lives in rural areas.
Other experts note that there are also ethical considerations to randomly assigning infrastructure access to members within the same community. The approach the REPP team is testing effectively allows for electricity connectivity to be randomized, while avoiding potential allegations of unfairness or favoritism. This is because the study merely encourages access by offering some households a discount for a power line connection.
The REPP team selected 150 villages in western Kenya that are within a mile( 1.6 km) of a power transformer. In half of those villages, about 1,100 households were offered the discount; the other villages were not. Hundreds of the“ treatment group” households responded
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