IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/got/gotcrc/218.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Impact of Livestock Ownership on Solar Home System Adoption in the Northern and Western Regions of Rural Tanzania

Author

Listed:
  • Stephan Klasen

    (Georg-August University Göttingen)

  • Tukae Mbegalo

    (Georg-August University Göttingen)

Abstract

Livestock has been hypothesized to be one of the major buffer stocks for consumption smoothing in rural areas of developing countries. It is therefore hard for poor farmers in the developing world to finance large investments. We test the latter by estimating a latent variable model of solar home systems. We use off-grid household data from four districts of mainland rural Tanzania. Results indicate that solar adoption is higher for livestock owners than non-livestock owners and that these differences increase as household expenditure increases, but there is no statistical difference at lower- and some middle-expenditure levels. We argue that poor families tend to keep small livestock, which may not generate enough income for investment. They may also decide to accumulate livestock due to a lack of incentives to invest in solar. Furthermore, solar prevalence plays a role in the observed differences of solar adoption. Thus, solar investment financed through livestock will also depend on whether households have enough information on solar technology. In principle, if solar is to spread within a community, households will have to have information on the upfront costs and maintenance costs and the social and economic benefits of solar technology.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephan Klasen & Tukae Mbegalo, 2016. "The Impact of Livestock Ownership on Solar Home System Adoption in the Northern and Western Regions of Rural Tanzania," Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers 218, Courant Research Centre PEG.
  • Handle: RePEc:got:gotcrc:218
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www2.vwl.wiso.uni-goettingen.de/courant-papers/CRC-PEG_DP_218.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:got:gotcrc:218. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dominik Noe (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/82144.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.