While voltage problems are believed to be ubiquitous in low-income countries, the impact of voltage quality on the economy is understudied. Novel minute-by-minute customer-level power measurements linked to panel surveys in urban Ghana reveal systematic under-voltage, damaging equipment and incentivizing protective investments. Customers would pay 10% more for electricity with better voltage. Quasi-random grid improvements raised average voltage by 5.5V, reducing appliance damages, but yielded minimal economic impacts after one year. Investments may generate longer-run returns — for example, after customers upgrade appliances — pointing to the complexity of allocating long-term investments with short-term data. We provide a framework for evaluating power grid investments.

This paper studies how contracting and monitoring structures in public procurement affect large-scale infrastructure construction. Between 2016–2022, Kenya's public electric utility ran competitive auctions and then awarded and administered dozens of donor-funded procurement contracts to connect millions to electricity. The causal analyses leverage natural and experimental policy variation along with granular, independently-collected construction quality data. Despite largely harmonized procedures, Kenya Power contracts funded by the World Bank featured unbundled contract components — known as ‘design-bid-build’ — and enhanced monitoring compared to contracts funded by the African Development Bank. This delayed construction progress but improved quality, while randomized inspections improved quality without large delays. The results suggest a combination of bundled contracting with additional independent monitoring could achieve similar quality improvements without incurring significant delays.

Existing research demonstrates that political favoritism distorts the allocation of public investments. This paper builds on this rich literature by modeling the welfare gains from public investment under the observed, politically motivated allocation, comparing it to several counterfactual scenarios. Using granular infrastructure, electoral, and census data on Kenya's national electricity grid access project, we first show that areas with majority pro-government vote shares received 35-42% more household and village electrification relative to the formula legislated to promote equity. Surprisingly, we estimate that this deviation increased total consumer surplus by 2%. This came at the expense of opposition voters, who received 21% less surplus gain from the program on average than if the allocation had followed the legislated formula. The observed deviation from the legislated formula also disproportionately disadvantaged households in the poorest income quintile, who received 12% less surplus. We then show that the counterfactual surplus-maximizing allocation is in fact politically neutral. Thus even though the observed deviation from the legislated formula increased total surplus in this context, political bias in the observed allocation cannot be justified on the basis of surplus maximization alone, and must be weighed against the potentially adverse long-term welfare impacts of heightened political and economic inequality.

Many routine daily activities — such as cooking and commuting — cause large recurring pollution spikes that may impact health without significantly affecting average exposure. We study pollution spikes by combining experimental variation in cooking technology with high-frequency data on individual pollution exposure and time-use in Kenya. Improved cookstoves reduce PM2.5 spikes while cooking by 51.3 micrograms/m³ (41%) and cause a 0.24 standard deviation reduction in self-reported respiratory symptoms. However, even after more than three years of daily use, we find no clinical health improvements, possibly because we detect no impact on average exposure. Clinical health improvements may require reductions in ambient concentrations.

In response to the Covid-19 crisis, 186 countries implemented direct cash transfers to households, and 181 introduced in-kind programs that lowered the cost of utilities such as electricity, water, transport, and mobile money. During times of crisis, do people prefer in-kind transfers or cash, and why? In this paper, we compare electricity transfers against a benchmark of cash transfers (mobile money) among 2000 rural and urban residents of Kenya with pre-paid electricity meter connections. We offer participants an incentivized choice between electricity transfers or mobile money, totaling approximately USD 10 to 15, and then implement their choice over three months. We generate three main findings. First, participants overwhelmingly prefer cash, with three-quarters of participants opting for mobile money even when offered electricity tokens with a cash value that is 40 percent higher, possibly due to the flexibility in expenditures or credit constraints. Second, despite relatively low baseline electricity consumption, preference for cash is slightly lower in rural areas, possibly due to higher transaction costs for purchasing electricity, lower mobile money penetration, or savings constraints. Third, electricity tokens transfers generate a larger increase in electricity consumption than equivalent cash transfers, suggesting a role for mental accounting; however, we estimate no impact of either electricity or cash transfers on a broad set of socioeconomic outcomes. These patterns suggest that mobile money transfers generate larger welfare gains than electricity credit, at least in settings with high mobile money penetration.

We study an energy efficient charcoal cookstove in an experiment with 1,000 households in Nairobi. We estimate a 39 percent reduction in charcoal spending, which matches engineering estimates, generating a 295 percent annual return. Despite fuel savings of $237 over the stove's two-year lifespan — and $295 in emissions reductions — households are only willing to pay $12. Drawing attention to energy savings does not increase demand. However, a loan more than doubles willingness to pay: credit constraints prevent adoption of privately optimal technologies. Energy efficient technologies could drive sustainable development by slowing greenhouse emissions while saving households money.

We provide descriptive evidence on the challenges in efficiently, effectively, and fairly distributing in-kind electricity transfers to households. We collect panel data from 1200 households eligible for Ghana's COVID-19 electricity relief program. Distributing relief through electricity transfers enabled an immediate response to the crisis. Theoretical efficiency concerns are mitigated because transfers were inframarginal and storable for most households. Transfer receipt may have increased support for the governing party, possibly due to obfuscation of the program's financial burden. However, the program was regressive in design, and implementation challenges — delays, technological hurdles, information constraints, and the targeting of meters rather than households — add to inefficiency and regressivity. Households receiving the least average relief are those who use less electricity, pay a landlord or other intermediary for electricity, or share an electricity meter — characteristics of low-income households. Program implementation challenges were just as important as design features in determining program costs and benefits.

How does temperature affect household energy demand in low-income countries? This paper uses 132,375,282 hourly electricity consumption observations from 5,975 households in South Africa to estimate the causal effects of short-term temperature changes on household electricity consumption. The estimates flexibly identify a constant log-linear temperature response — for every 1°C increase in temperature, electricity consumption decreases by 4.1% among temperatures below the heating threshold but increases by 8.1% among temperatures above the cooling threshold. This relationship is driven more strongly by seasonal than hourly temperature changes. Holding all else constant, a 3.25°C increase in temperatures would reduce electricity consumption by 1,093.4 kWh (6.2%) per year per household. Widespread use of electric heating due to limited residential gas heating infrastructure likely drives this. These results point to important regional heterogeneity in how temperature increases may affect household energy demand in the coming decades.

The vision of sensor systems that collect critical and previously ungathered information about the world is often only realized when sensors, students, and subjects move outside the academic laboratory. However, deployments at even the smallest scales introduce complexities and risks that can be difficult for a research team to anticipate. Over the past year, our interdisciplinary team of engineers and economists has been designing, deploying, and operating a large sensor network in Accra, Ghana that measures power outages and quality at households and firms. This network consists of 457 custom sensors, over 3,000 mobile app instances, thousands of participant surveys, and custom user incentive and deployment management systems. In part, this deployment supports an evaluation of the impacts of investments in the grid on reliability and the subsequent effects of improvements in reliability on socioeconomic well-being. We report our experiences as we move from performing small pilot deployments to our current scale, attempting to identify the pain points at each stage of the deployment. Finally, we extract high-level observations and lessons learned from our deployment activities, which we wish we had originally known when forecasting budgets, human resources, and project timelines. These insights will be critical as we look toward scaling our deployment to the entire city of Accra and beyond, and we hope that they will encourage and support other researchers looking to measure highly granular information about our world’s critical systems.

We estimate the impact of the rollout of a Kenyan program that connected the vast majority of Kenyan secondary schools to the electricity grid on the number of students taking a secondary completion exam and their exam performance. Using administrative data from western Kenya and a differences-in-differences approach, and controlling for school and time fixed effects, we find no significant impact on either the number of students taking the exams, or on exam scores. We explore secondary school energy usage via an original school survey and find that electricity access is still unreliable for many schools, with over half of schools reporting a blackout in the last three days.

Egyptian and Sudanese legal systems and societies have long led to discrimination and violence against homosexuals. Through a series of anecdotes, this article explores the daily struggles faced by individuals in these conservative and largely Muslim societies. We look for the sources of the discrimination and violence they confront, and we acknowledge that much is rooted in societal gender and sexual norms. Therefore we question whether regional political change following the Arab Spring will necessarily transform the societal circumstances for homosexuals in the near future. Nonetheless, we remain optimistic that change is possible, provided LGBT rights advocacy maintains support internationally, nationally, and within their local communities.