Although Kenya enjoys a high and widespread daily solar insolation, and despite enactment of policies to promote adoption of renewable energy technologies, not many households have picked up solar technologies. The objective of this study is to find out the incidence and predictors of actual up-take of solar technology as well as households’ desire to switch to solar in light of their perception of its cost advantage.

The increasing block tariff (IBT) is among the most widely used tariffs by water utilities, particularly in developing countries. This is in part due to the perception that the IBT can effectively target subsidies to low-income households. Combining data on households’ socioeconomic status and metered water use, this paper examines the distributional incidence of subsidies delivered through the water tariff in Nairobi, Kenya.

The EfD Report 2014/15  gives you an excellent overview of the EfD centres´ achievements during 2014 and ongoing work during 2015. Ranging from interesting policy stories on how economic research is put to use around the world to collaborative research programs, a wide range of publications, and our academic capacity building program. 

As the disease burden of poor access to water and sanitation declines around the world, the non-health benefits – mainly the time burden of water collection – will likely grow in importance in sector funding decisions and investment analysis. We measure the coping costs incurred by households in one area of rural Kenya. Sixty percent of the 387 households interviewed were collecting water outside the home, and household members were spending an average of two to three hours doing so per day.

Despite its importance in benefit-cost analysis in the water supply, transportation, and health care sectors, there are relatively few empirical estimates of the value of travel time savings (VTT) in low-income countries, particularly in rural areas. Analysts instead often rely on a textbook “rule of thumb” of valuing time at 50% of prevailing unskilled wage rates, though these benchmarks have little empirical support in these settings. We estimate the value of travel time through the use of a repeated discrete choice stated preference exercise.

The paper investigates the effects of climate change on food security in Kenya. Fixed and random effects regressions for food crop security are estimated. The study further simulates the expected impact of future climate change on food insecurity based on the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios and Atmospheric Oceanic Global Circulation Models. The study is based on county-level panel data for yields of four major crops and daily climate variables data spanning over three decades. The results show that climate variability and change will increase food insecurity.