The Gendered Implications of Energy Gaps in Health Care: A Comparative Analysis of Haiti, Senegal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo

The World Health Organization recently articulated a number of challenges faced by health systems due to unreliable access to energy services. Reliable energy availability at rural health facilities is understood to be an enabler of access to quality healthcare, owing to its potential impacts on medical services, health and safety, disease prevention and treatment, staff recruitment and retention, and administration and logistics. However, little is known empirically about the intersections of energy and healthcare, often due to the lack of availability of facility level data. Moreover, the gender implications of energy access (or lack thereof) for women as providers and seekers of primary healthcare have not been investigated. In this study, using a gender lens, we explore the linkages between energy and healthcare in three Francophone countries in the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa: Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Haiti and Senegal. All three countries have faced serious challenges to the provision of quality health services, including infrastructure problems and specifically unreliable access to electricity. We use Demographic Health Survey data from all three countries to present detailed descriptions of the association between (a) the availability and reliability of electricity sources, and (b) availability of health services, equipment and medical personnel at different levels of the respective health systems. We find that the unavailability and unreliability of electricity is associated with lower availability of medical equipment and basic health services, especially among facilities at the primary care level in DRC and Haiti. Our findings highlight the opportunity to create more dependable and sustainable health systems by integrating decentralized clean energy technologies into health infrastructure, which can facilitate providers in female-dominated cadres such as nursing the ability to provide the care they are tasked with.