NOVAFRICA Seminar: Subhrendu K Pattanayak, Duke University — Electrifying Empowerment: Women and Energy Access

In our upcoming NOVAFRICA Seminar, we are pleased to welcome Professor Subhrendu K Pattanayak, on Wednesday, 10th December, at 11:30 AM (Lisbon time), in Room B008, Nova School of Business and Economics, Carcavelos campus, who will present his paper:

“Electrifying Empowerment: Women and Energy Access”

Abstract
Most of us woke up this morning, used energy and technology to learn about the weather and the news, got a fresh cup of coffee, and went about our day informed and refreshed. Imagine if every woman in a poor remote village could power on technology for vital information the same way. Yet, they cannot. Lack of energy access disempowers women. This presentation (and paper) begins by reviewing what we know and what we do not know, from applied empirical research, about the different ways in which energy access empowers women. An important conclusion is the two-way relationship between women’s empowerment and the adoption and use of clean energy technologies, and the challenge of causal research. The second part of the presentation (and paper) describes a series of coordinated studies to measure women’s agency and empowerment in Africa and Asia, with special attention to time use. Finally, the presentation (paper) focuses on a specific randomized control trial in Myanmar, bracketed first by COVID and then a coup. We consider the question that in many settings, gender norms relegate women to domestic roles, which, in turn, may erode their sense of agency across many life domains and lower their aspirations. This may further discourage them from pursuing fruitful opportunities, including clean energy investments, which could ease women’s disproportionate burden from household work and raise their productive potential. We ran a randomized control trial in the states of Ayeyarwady and Tanintharyi of Myanmar to test a psychological empowerment intervention that combines an “edutainment” component with a series of visualization, goal setting and planning exercises drawn from motivational psychology. The intervention was highly successful at raising women’s empowerment, particularly on dimensions (financial and business agency) most salient in the story. However, we only see positive effects on aspirations for productive appliances and for children’s education in unelectrified villages, where we also see a matching increase in education expenditures, the time women spend on childcare, and the probability that households took out a business loan. We argue that a harder path to higher education in these areas means that there is still a larger share of people that can be influenced by the education-focused component of the edutainment story. These effects are driven by the more ambitious, empowered, and educated women, suggesting that which subgroups and which dimensions of aspirations respond to the intervention depend on how feasible those aspirations feel. The presentation (papers) concludes with lessons for research and for policy not just from this trial in Myanmar, but also the coordinated studies and the systematic reviews, about the links between empowerment and energy access.

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