Welfare Impact of Solar Lantern in Northern Bangladesh

Title:

Welfare Impact of Solar Lantern in Northern Bangladesh

Publication:

Can Solar Lanterns Improve Youth Academic Performance? Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh (with Yuya Kudo and Kazushi Takahashi). The World Bank Economic Review . (Forthcoming). [pdf]

• Winner of Albert Berry Prize in Canadian Economic Association (CEA) Conference for Best Paper in Development Economics by a Junior Scholar in 2016, nominated by Canadian Development Economics Study Group (CDESG) and funded by International Development Research Center (IDRC), Canada.
• Blog Mention: SONNENSEITE

Other Working Papers:

Short-term Impacts of Solar Lanterns on Child Health: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh [pdf]

Motivation

Access to electricity is an essential tool of modern days that can bring substantial improvements to the standard of living. Once a household gets access to electricity, a direct benefit is the higher level of lighting which helps children to have more hours of studying and adults to have more active hours, which could be useful for completing household chores and being engaged in productive activities, for example, keeping the home-based businesses remain open for longer hours or producing more outputs or being active with other production or income generating activities. The indirect impact of electricity is by enabling households to be able to access modern equipment which help households to have better heating and cooking facilities, mechanical power, and reliable transport and telecommunications services. However, "Energy Poverty", a terminology used by international agencies to express the lack of access to energy services, hampers billions of people’s lives on a daily basis who typically depend on traditional biomass fuels, which is inefficient as well as alarmingly detrimental to pulmonary health by causing severe indoor air pollution (IAP). As of 2013, there are 1.3 billion people who live without access to electricity in developing countries (IEA 2013), out of which a majority resides in the rural areas. Over 80 percent of these "energy poor" households in developing world have been accessing lights in the nights using kerosene-based candles, lamps or lanterns. For instance, in Bangladesh, kerosene based simple open-fire wick lamps are the most widespread and popular device to have access to light in the night at non-electrified areas. A kerosene lamp typically consist of two parts, the bottom is a small tin based containers that holds the kerosene while the upper part has uncovered wick which is dipped in kerosene to provide light by burning. Solar lamps are the only few available lighting options for the poor, however, these lights are really inefficient in terms of providing lights. Moreover, by burning bio-mass energy, these lights emit a staggering amount of IAP, whose scale is higher than the international standards and poses a serious health and fire related hazard risks (Apple, Vicente et al. (2010)).

Given the widespread use of biomass fuels for the source of lighting and its adverse impact of environment and pulmonary health, governments, policy makers and international donors have now started to pay more attention to the energy poverty and the need to provide access to electricity in the rural areas. A large body of literature discusses many direct and indirect benefits of electricity in the rural context of developing countries.^[1] However, despite the willingness and effort to increase the electricity access, one particular challenge for any government and technology provider is to extend the grid electricity service to remote and geographically challenged areas where costs of grid extension is very high and usually extending the service to these areas are unfeasible and unsustainable. One particular example of such an area is the river islands of the North West part of Bangladesh. River islands, which are locally known as “Char’’, are areas of land that are formed regularly by silt sediments and are eroded periodically by major rivers of Bangladesh. These islands are just a few inches above the normal active river water level and are extremely vulnerable to flooding during the wet season as monsoon precipitation coupled with excessive glacier melting of the Himalayas usually overflows the major river channels of Bangladesh. Floods frequently result in loss of economic activity, possessions and homes disrupting families, livelihoods and earnings. Erosion of large Char areas due to floods is typical and not limited to Northern Bangladesh. In every year, some of Char population is forced to evacuate to mainland to look for shelters after the flood. Transportation and communication with Chars from the mainland are also major impediments to development. Major mode of transportation with Char islands is by boat which is poorly managed, unreliable and prone to weather conditions. Therefore, living in Char is highly precarious, risky and dangerous in times, however, according to the statistics of the DFID funded recent initiative of Char Livelihood Program (CLP), approximately one million people resides in the chars of the Jamuna rivers (Conroy 2010).

Unsurprisingly, the provision of electricity is almost non-existence in the char areas and the Rural Electrification Board of Bangladesh does not have any plan to expand the electricity in the char areas due to the vulnerability nature of the char. Some NGOs have tried to provide some small scale Solar Home System (SHS)^[2]; however, such SHS is quite expensive^[3]

and has some physical constraints which are not appropriate for the Char scenario. As mentioned above, Char living is extremely vulnerable which requires flexibility to allow frequent relocation and mobility. Unfortunately, the SHS is a fixed and immobile utility where the access of electricity is only available at the installed place. SHS system does not allow users to use the light in the night go out of the house or to use in the night to access toilets. Moreover, during the time of flood or land erosion, when quick relocation is necessary, households find it extremely difficult and expensive to move their SHS system along with them. As a result the use of SHS in char context is very limited. Since there is hardly any alternative source for electricity in the Char, most of the people prefer to use kerosene-based lamp for their only source of light at the night. Some households use battery powered torch lights to accommodate their emergency use, however, these lights have very limited power to do any additional tasks and also the cost of battery is quiet expensive and these batteries are not always available by the char dwellers.

D.light design, a social enterprise in California, has recently designed a series of low cost and light weight solar lights^[4] which are durable, weather resistant and has the capacity to produce bright white light, through LED bulbs. Top of their product range is the Dlight Solar lantern (s250 or s300) which has the dual functionality to use a cell phone charger as well as a solar light. Dlight claims that their solar lantern products (s250 or s300) could brighten-up a middle sized room as much as a 5 Watt CFL lamp can and capable of providing up to 10 times more light than a traditional kerosene lantern and reduces the health risks posed by the kerosene fume[5] . The price of such a product is 2600 taka per unit which is about one-fourth of the available SHS system in Bangladesh. This product has the potential to be an ideal low-cost light source, alternative to the typical kerosene lamps for the people living in chars. The best feature of this product at the char context is its mobility; once charged, users can take the unit wherever they want which could be extremely useful for the char dwellers who could use the unit for a range of purposes, from productive activities as well as in need of emergency. Moreover, such lanterns could enhance the learning of the children who typically use kerosene-based lighting for their school based home-works and study requirements. School going children of Chars, lacking access to reliable energy, are depending on dim kerosene lamps as their main source of lighting, which inhibits their study through dimness, indoor air pollution, fire hazards and high marginal cost of usage that makes poor parents unwilling to provide ample kerosene in the night to continue the study.

However, promoting and marketing such products with health and welfare benefits to the poor population has been always a big challenge for the technology providers, as the take-up rate of the technology has been disappointingly low. Quite a few explanations have been pointed-out by researchers through analyzing the low adoption rates of technology in developing countries, which are liquidity or credit constraint (Gine et al., 2008; Cohen & Dupas, 2010; Cole et al., 2010; Dupas & Robinson, 2011), inability to realize adoption benefits (Feder & Slade, 1984; Conley & Udry, 2001; Gine & Yang, 2009), self-control problems (Banerjee & Mullainathan, 2010; Duflo et al., 2011), benefits are external to the households (Kremer & Miguel, 2007), risk-averse to experimentation (Foster & Rosenzweig, 1995; Conley & Udry, 2010; Bryan et al., 2013) or household bargaining and decision problem (Miller and Mushfiq 2013), to name a few. However, recently there has been a growing number of researches which focus on innovative ways to improve the uptake-rate of welfare enhancing technology for the poor and we have started to see some success, for example see BenYisay (2013), which provides evidence of complex market and decision making process of the poor households in the developing countries that requires further research.

The Objective of this Study

The aim of this research is to assess the impacts of new technology for low-cost yet mobile off-grid electricity provision at the char areas in Bangladesh. So far there has been only one small scale Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) that has accessed the health and study impact of small solar lamps in Uganda (Furukawa, 2012 and 2013) and the paper found rather negative impact of solar lamp on exam scores of the treated children and a diminutive improvement in health outcomes. Also Furukawa (2013) found that only 30% of the free distributed solar lamps were in active use, after one year of the intervention, which creates a puzzle of actual adaptation and use of such products at the rural context. Employing an RCT set-up, our research objective is to improve our understanding of the direct causal impact of access to solar lantern on various outcomes both at the household level and at the individual level. At the household level, we aim to estimate the impact of solar lanterns on kerosene consumption as well as savings and income improvements. At the individual level, the impact assessment of solar lanterns will be based on children’s health, education performance and time use. Once the direct benefit of such product is achieved, on the second half of this project, we will emphasize on the likely channels to improve the uptake rate of the product and will try to bridge the knowledge gap of promoting the adoption and up-take rate of new technology in the developing countries.

Research Financing:

In association with Kopernik[6], with the generous funding provided from Daiwa Securities, and BRAC, one of the largest NGOs of the world, our implementation partner NGO, Gono Unnayan Kendra (GUK) has been donated with 500 units of D.light designed S250 along with additional 300 units of other two types of products (s10 and s1) from BRAC to do the impact study of such an innovative product in the Char areas of Northern Bangladesh. GUK helped us to choose schools located at the Chars in Northern Bangladesh.

[1] For example see Peters et. al. 2011, Khandker et. al. 2009, Khandker et. al. 2009; Lipscomb et. al. 2013, Dinkleman, 2011.

[2] For example see Grameen Shakti, http://www.gshakti.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=62

[3] the minimum one has to pay for a 10 watt panel with a 2/3 LED light or a 5 watt CFL is 9800 taka which provides light for only 4 hours, http://www.gshakti.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=115&Itemid=124

[4] http://www.dlightdesign.com/

[5] kopernik.info/technology/dlight-s250-solar-lantern

[6] http://kopernik.info/