More than 1.1 billion people in developing countries lack access to electricity with
a large share living in rural Africa. It is hypothesized that economic and human
development are difficult without electricity access. Tanzania is one of the poorest
countries in the world and the country’s huge geographical extent and low population
density makes infrastructure development such as electrification a particularly
difficult exercise. The electrification rate is extremely low at around 46 percent
in urban and 4 percent in rural areas. The access to reliable modern energy
has become one of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2014) and the international
community has embarked on a historical mission through the United Nations
initiative Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All) that strives to provide electricity
to everybody by 2030. Investment requirements to achieve this goal are enormous
and large gaps exist so far. Additional investment initiatives are required.
This report presents results from a baseline survey for an upcoming electrification
project that intends to rehabilitate and extend three isolated grids in Western Tanzania,
namely those installed in the towns of Biharamulo, Ngara and Mpanda.
Given the baseline nature of this report, most attention will be paid to energy
access and usage in the absence of the project, and less attention to the project
itself. The survey was conducted between December 2014 and February 2015 as
part of an impact evaluation to examine the project effects in Tanzania on different
socio-economic impact dimensions. A second survey is planned to be conducted
about two years after connection of the new generator sets. The focus of this study
is on two types of treatments: the service upgrade of already connected households
and enterprises in towns suffering from frequent outages and load shedding, and
the new connection of hitherto non-connected households and enterprises in the
surrounding villages. In the sampled rural areas, a control group of communities
was surveyed that is foreseen not to be connected by the time of the follow-up
survey. For the urban sample, no control group approach can be pursued, simply
because comparable towns facing the same situation of deteriorating isolated
grids in a similar socio-economic environment that could serve as a control group do not exist. This approach is complemented by a willingness-to-pay analysis to
capture the effect of the service upgrade.
In total, we interviewed around 1,000 households in rural areas, 300 households
in urban areas, and 500 urban enterprises. The impact indicators we look at are
related to current appliance usage and the potential improvements in lighting usage
for recreational, productive, or educational purposes that might result from
electrification. The purpose of this report is to present the collected data and to
portray the socio-economic living conditions in the surveyed areas as well as to
examine the comparability of the selected treatment and control groups foreseen
for the ex-post impact evaluation. If these groups turn out to be non-comparable
before the intervention, the impact estimate in the follow-up may be biased.
In general, the quality of the collected data appears to be good. Non-response
rates are low at clearly below 5 percent for all questions. Patterns across the income
distribution are consistent, for example poorer rural households are more
inclined to use traditional energy sources. Moreover, we could underpin the assumption
of sufficiently similar treatment and control villages. While a few statistically
significant differences could be observed, the size of these differences (i.e.
the economic significance) is small and will not threat our identification assumptions.