Living Standards Measurement Study
Follow Us
ENERGY
Multitopic household surveys continue to be the source of data for measuring families’ energy access in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Yet, data currently available are insufficient to inform the design of policies and private sector initiatives to increase access to energy.
To address this gap, the LSMS has partnered with the World Bank’s Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP), which supports developing countries to tackle their energy challenges and is leading Mission 300, an ambitious initiative of the World Bank and the African Development Bank to provide 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa with access to electricity by 2030.
1. Measuring Energy Access in Household Surveys
Traditionally, energy access has been measured in binary terms, “connected or not connected” for electricity, and “solid or non-solid fuels” for cooking. But to inform successful policy interventions, granular data is required.
To improve the collection of data, the ESMAP developed the Multi-Tier Framework (MTF), a system that redefines energy access measurement and categorizes households in tiers to provide a detailed understanding of energy consumption. The categories that redefine the measurement of energy access are: availability, reliability, quality, affordability, formality, and health and safety. For cooking modalities, the tiers include: solution, exposure and efficiency, convenience, safety, affordability and reliability.
To support the implementation of the MTF, the LSMS has worked with the ESMAP and the World Health Organization (WHO) to develop international guidelines to measure household energy access: A Guide to Collecting Data Using ‘The Core Questions on Household Energy Use’. They offer recommendations to design questionnaires, ensuring that the minimum set of information to categorize households is collected, and to work on the tier categorization once the data is available.
2. Improving Measurement of Clean Cooking
While some variables measured by the MTF can be collected directly from respondents during the survey, others require objective measurement, such as the exposure and efficiency of cooking modalities to allow the categorization of cookstoves.
The components above require methodological research that the LSMS team is working on. It will focus on assessing the feasibility of deploying in situ tools for measuring indoor air quality as part of household survey operations.
3. Measuring Hyperlocal Energy Access through Integration with Geospatial Data
Granular energy data collection in household surveys can be challenging when resources are limited. But one of the characteristics of the surveys supported by the LSMS is that they are georeferenced – the process of connecting a digital image to a particular location – and this allows a seamless integration with geospatial data.
The LSMS team will collaborate with the ESMAP team and other experts to leverage the insights provided by georeferenced survey data to train machine learning algorithms that will be applied to high-resolution geospatial data to frequently obtain hyperlocal data on the relationship between energy access and development more broadly, to inform large-scale project design and evaluation efforts.
Guidance
