My dissertation research explores relationships between expanded electricity access (Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7), women's empowerment (SDG 5), and mitigating climate change risk (SDG 13) in two Sub-Saharan African countries, Zambia and Burkina Faso. Most studies quantifying the benefits of electricity access focus on changes in the number of household electricity connections; however, if and how access to electricity improves women's quality of life and reduces their risk is best understood by examining the cultural context, norms, and gender roles in which that access occurs. For instance, time saved from the use of electric appliances may be used for productive engagements, including paid employment, but if gender roles restrict women from leaving the home or engaging in paid work, such benefits are not realized. Developing countries such as Zambia and Burkina Faso are ramping up electrification efforts to achieve clean and accessible energy for all by 2030. Yet in this effort, there is a focus on off-grid renewable technologies like solar to increase access to rural and remote households for which a connection to the grid would be too expensive. Off-grid technologies likely mitigate the effects of climate change; however, their limited capacity and lack of reliability limit the extent to which they can power most of the appliances needed by women hoping to operate small businesses. The additional income from these small businesses may be increasingly important as hazards from climate change such as extreme temperatures and high variability in rainfall adversely affect people's livelihoods, farmers in particular. Adapting to these risks requires first perceiving them, and women may perceive these risks differently from men, while also certainly having different access to resources and electricity. In this dissertation, I examine access, empowerment and climate risk perceptions in Burkina Faso and Zambia where gender disparities are high, and a significant proportion of the population is engaged in agriculture and vulnerable to climate change risks. In my first essay, I examine how different types of electricity access affect time use between men and women and identify the everyday activities where electricity may have the greatest impact on women's quality of life. Using the World Bank's Multi-Tier Framework (MTF) dataset for Zambia, I apply a Tobit model to examine how male and female household members allocate their time among different activities and the impact of different types of electric connections on those allocations. The results show that compared to households without electricity, off-grid connections significantly increase women's time in paid work, more so than grid connections, while grid connections significantly increase the time both men and women spend listening to the radio and watching television. These activities have been shown to be key to empowering women through exposure to women in emancipated roles, decreased fertility rates, lower acceptance of intimate partner violence, and increased share of divorce and separation. Off-grid connected households showed no difference in television or radio time and increased time in energy-related activities for both men and women compared to households without electricity. These results suggest that efforts to expand grid-connected and off-grid electricity may have different effects on women's quality of life. In my second essay, I delve deeper into the multi-faceted and context-specific concept of empowerment. In this qualitative study, I conducted 28 semi-structured interviews with Zambian women from households with and without electricity to better understand their subjective meaning of empowerment and how access to electricity may (dis) empower them. We analyzed their responses using the Spaces approach to empowerment which categorizes an individual's spaces into physical, economic, political, socio-cultural, and mental space and measures the expansion of mental space along with another space as an indicator of empowerment. We find that electricity access empowers women by expanding their economic, physical, and mental space. Expansion of these spaces takes place primarily through generating income opportunities outside the home, made possible by the use of electrical appliances, and women reporting greater economic independence, camaraderie, self-reliance, and agency as a result. In my third essay, I examine how long-term changes in temperature and rainfall are perceived by farmers in Burkina Faso. I also compared the extent to which these perceptions align with actual recorded changes in temperature and rainfall for multiple periods between 1991 and 2014. I used a logistic regression model to analyze the role of resources, such as asset ownership and perceived standards of living, along with household size, age, and gender of the household head to explain differences in perception and ultimately the decision to adapt. The results show that the vast majority of farmers in Burkina Faso perceive changes in temperature and rainfall; however, only about half of those individuals perceive changes in ways that align with recorded long-term trends in their local temperature or rainfall. The extent to which those perceptions align with recorded changes depends on the time frame selected. Older farmers and those with assets were less likely to perceive temperature and rainfall trends in ways that aligned with climate records; however, farmers' perceptions of temperature change aligning with records and their perceived standard of living were both associated with the decision to adapt.
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