Household's use of cooking gas and Children's learning outcomes in rural Ghana

Abstract

Children in Sub-Saharan Africa spend a non-trivial amount of their time cooking and collecting fuel for domestic use. This is particularly the case in rural areas where access to efficient energy is low, and children’s academic performance is poor. This paper argues that households' use of cooking gas could reduce the time spent doing domestic chores, increase learning time, and improve children's school performance. We investigate this proposition using the Ghana Living Standards Survey data. We employ different instrumental variable estimations techniques to deal with the possible endogeneity problem. The results show that cooking with gas marginally improves the learning outcome of children in rural Ghana. Our results imply that the adoption of cooking gas could enhance human capital development in developing countries.