Pathways to clean cooking fuel transition in low and middle income Sub-Saharan African countries: The relevance of improving energy use efficiency

Most of the Sub-Saharan African countries are heavily reliant on unclean cooking fuels due to facing multifaceted difficulties in overcoming such monotonic cooking fuel dependency. However, considering the environmental and human health hazards associated with the combustion of dirty cooking fuels, it has become imperative for these nations to identify the factors that can enable them to undergo a transition from the use of unclean to relatively cleaner cooking fuels. Against this backdrop, this current study aims to assess whether improving the level of energy efficiency can enhance access to clean cooking fuel and technology in selected developing nations across Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a seminal study that separately estimates the effects of energy efficiency gains on clean cooking fuel and technology access rates separately for low-, lower-middle-, and upper-middle-income Sub-Saharan African countries. The findings derived from this study are anticipated to help the Sub-Saharan African nations and other similar developing countries worldwide to partially attain the clean energy transition targets mentioned under the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals agenda of the United Nations. Overall, the results from the econometric analysis indicate that energy efficiency gains initially cannot enhance access to clean cooking fuel and technology but beyond certain energy efficiency threshold levels it can be effective in improving the access rates. Besides, the predicted energy efficiency thresholds are observed to vary across the Sub-Saharan African nations belonging to different income groups and levels of clean cooking fuel and technology access for the respective population. However, in all cases, the estimated energy efficiency threshold levels are witnessed to be greater than the mean level of energy use efficiency of these countries. Moreover, results also certify that economic growth, environmental pollution, financial globalization, financial development, and women empowerment are some of the other major drivers of clean cooking fuel transition across Sub-Saharan Africa. However, the impacts of these macroeconomic variables are observed to be relatively larger for the comparatively richer and less unclean cooking fuel-dependent nations. Accordingly, this study recommends that the associated governments should implement policies that can expedite the rate of energy efficiency improvement, speed up the economic growth rate, restrict the influx of unclean foreign direct investments, develop the financial sector, and ensure greater empowerment of women for facilitating clean cooking fuel transition across this region.(c) 2021 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.