This impact report is part of an evaluation commissioned by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It belongs to a series of impact evaluations of renewable energy and development programmes supported by the Netherlands, with a focus...

Off-grid solar electric power is a promising technology for remote regions in rural Africa where expansion of the electricity grids is prohibitively expensive. Using household data from a target region of an off-grid solar promotion program in Burkina Faso, this paper explores the role of...

Non-electrified people in Africa, still more than 500 million today, have been using kerosene and candles for their lighting purposes for decades. The lighting quality of these sources is low and in particular kerosene usage is associated with harmful soot emissions. Alleviating this grievance...

The use of well-designed improved cookstoves (ICS) in regions devoid of modern energy yields high private and social returns, mostly related to considerable woodfuel savings. Take-up rates are nonetheless often very low when people have to pay costcovering prices. This paper presents main...

Today 2.6 billion people in developing countries rely on biomass as primary cooking fuel, with profound negative implications for their well-being. Improved biomass cooking stoves are alleged to counteract these adverse effects. This paper evaluates take-up and impacts of low-cost improved...

There is a consensus in the international community that rural electrification and, in particular, the productive use of electricity contributes to poverty alleviation. At the same time, efforts to evaluate the impacts of development projects have increased substantially. This paper provides a...

Charcoal is an important cooking fuel in urban Africa. In this paper, we estimate the current number of charcoal users and project trends for the coming decades. Charcoal production is often not effectively regulated, and it hence contributes to forest degradation. Moreover, charcoal has adverse...

Free distribution of a technology can be an effective development policy instrument if its adoption is socially inefficient and hampered by affordability constraints. Improved cookstoves may be such a case: they generate high environmental and public health returns, but adoption is generally...

More than 1.1 billion people in developing countries lack access to electricity with a large share living in rural Africa. It is hypothesized that economic and human development are difficult without electricity access. Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world and the country's huge...

This paper replicates and extends the seminal paper by Dinkelman (2011) on the impacts of electrification on female employment. We revisit the validity of the identification strategy that uses the land gradient as an instrumental variable (IV). Our robustness checks cast doubt on the exclusion...