Off-farm work, cooking energy choice and time poverty in Ghana: An empirical analysis

This article examines the effect of off-farm work on cooking energy choice and time poverty using data from the seventh round of the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS) while controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic, community, and other geographic factors. We identified three main fuel types (dirty, transition, and clean fuel) and constructed different time poverty cutoffs based on household committed time. After controlling for endogeneity in off-farm work, we found that an increase in off-farm work is associated with a decrease in the use of dirty fuel but positively associated with clean fuel and time poverty. The result is robust to different estimation methods of addressing endogeneity and additional measures of time poverty. The findings show that consumption expenditure is an important channel through which off-farm work influences cooking energy choice and time poverty. The gains of using clean fuel can be sustained through public investment opportunities that encourage off-farm work. At the same time, time poverty can be reduced through the promotion of time-saving technologies.