Impact of energy accessibility to household welfare in Rwanda

Abstract

Nowadays, the world socioeconomic development and wellbeing of society is based on the energy accessibility. As the number of energy accessors increase some problems have been highlighted global like the climate change and global warming. Those problems lead the developing countries including Rwanda to the food insecurity and poverty. Easily accessible energy in Rwanda is biomass energy which occupy above 83% of the total energy consumption. Electrification and green energy like solar and gas energy is considerably increasingly accessed by Rwandans which define the country’s development and civilization. Those clean energy are mostly available in the cities compare to the rural villages which causes a negative impact of the people development in rural area. However, the industries and other businesses are located in the city due to the clean energy accessibility, and youth are shifting from rural area to the cities to look for jobs and civilized way of living. However, in this study we used to asses and analyze the impact of energy accessibility to the household’s welfare. The econometric approach method with Integrated Household Living Conditions Survey 5 (EICV5) has been used to assessing the country’s level of energy access and the impact of energy accessibility to the households ‘welfare is identified. During analysis those impacts, we used the ordinary least squares test (OLS) of simple regression analysis. The data from National institute of statistics Rwanda treated using STATA software show that the access to electricity affect household’s welfare in different expenses is 68%. It is significantly implying that when household has access to electricity the way of living improved in rural areas. With good clean energy accessibility, the non-farm business increasing due to from the small to the large industries need electricity to operate and they impacted by 68.4% from the coefficient estimates. In the education sector, there is an impact of clean energy accessibility which has 52.6%. More available of access to electricity cause the trending technology and research or browsing the world publication works and data in education being possible and hours of a student used to study per day increased. The different required equipment used in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics are electrified for useful outcomes in education. Therefore, the general consideration of the impact of the energy accessibility impact to the household’s welfare play an important role at a rate of 68% in people’ way of living in both rural areas and cities of Rwanda