The Impact of Conflict on Energy Poverty: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Shettima, Abdulkadir; Bassim, Mohga; Elheddad, Mohamed; Alfar, Abdelrahman

Abstract

This study uses the actual number of fatalities and influx of refugees as proxies for conflict to empirically investigate the impact of violent events on energy poverty in SSA over 30 years from 1990 to 2019. We use different proxies for energy poverty, including electricity consumption and electricity production in kWh and electricity access rate in percentage, thus covering both the demand and supply side of the spectrum. The data on the different electrification indices were obtained from the World Bank and the United Nations Statistics Division, while the conflict casualties were from the Armed Conflict Location Event Data. To ensure the robustness of our analysis, we applied different econometric techniques comprising fixed effects, Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) and quantile regression estimations to investigate the relationship between conflict fatalities and electricity poverty. All the different panel data models consistently show conflict fatalities to have a detrimental effect on electricity consumption, production and access rates. The fixed effects quantile regression analysis also reveals a disparate impact of conflict fatalities on electricity consumption and production depending on a given country’s energy poverty level. There is a progressive increase in the coefficients as energy poverty levels reduce, indicating that countries making appreciable progress in addressing electricity poverty are more at risk of faltering if conflict breaks out. However, replacing fatalities with the number of refugees in a host country as the proxy for conflict results in higher electricity access rates.

• Working Paper Type: Preprint
• Acceptance Date: Aug 27, 2023
• Publication Date: 2022
• Deposit Date: Feb 17, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 18, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4246615