Towards accessibility or affordability? Multidimensional energy poverty across the South African urban–rural divide

Abstract

This study combines energy affordability and accessibility into a multidimensional energy poverty measure, which we stratify by rural and urban locale. Accessibility considers a number of binary indicators related to the type of energy used for a series of household activities, while affordability is determined by the ratio of household required energy expenditure to total expenditure. We employ an equivalence scale approach to estimate household energy requirements using publicly available household expenditure survey data. Our results suggest extensive urban–rural disparities across our multidimensional indicators—37% of rural households are affordability deprived, which is nearly double urban affordability deprivation; the rural–urban differences are at least double, when it comes to clean cooking, lighting, space heating, water heating and multidimensional headcount poverty. After splitting the households by degrees of energy poverty, it is found that the extreme energy-poor are more likely to be income-poor. However, urban extreme energy-poor is driven by affordability deprivation, while more than half of the rural extreme energy-poor are deprived in both affordability and accessibility.