UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Pamela Jagger, an applied political economist whose research focuses on the dynamics of poverty and environment interactions in low-income countries, will give the talk, “Pathways to Household Energy Transitions in Africa,” at noon on Wednesday, Feb. 5, in 157 Hosler Building on Penn State's University Park campus. Her talk is part of the spring Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI) seminar series and is free and open to the public.
“Energy access is a formidable challenge in sub-Saharan Africa where more than 760 million people lack access to electricity and 80% of people lack access to clean cooking facilities,” said Jagger, professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan. “Africa lags far behind other Global South regions in the transition to clean household energy. Rapid population growth and slow energy transitions mean that Africa is the only region where the absolute number of people experiencing energy poverty will increase in the coming decades. Urgent and effective strategies are needed to bring clean household energy technologies to households.”
Over the past 10 years, Jagger has conducted a series of quantitative program evaluation studies in collaboration with governments, nongovernmental organizations and social enterprises to assess the impact of efforts to increase electricity access and reduce reliance on polluting cooking fuels. In her talk, she will discuss the results of her studies on the impact of solar technology promotion in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi, and household cooking energy interventions in Malawi, Rwanda and Zambia.
“Adoption of solar technologies is a promising pathway to providing limited electricity access,” Jagger said. “While the number of households with solar technologies is rapidly increasing, most systems have exceptionally low capacity, suggesting limited potential for increased productivity through solar technology adoption. Clean cooking interventions are hindered by unreliable fuel and stove supply chains, sustained adoption of improved or clean stoves, and complex patterns of fuel/stove stacking within households. This makes reductions in air pollution burden and energy expenditures elusive. Our results offer insights for policymakers, donors and the private sector as they continue to engage in strategies to move households in sub-Saharan Africa toward sustainable energy for all.”
Jagger leads the interdisciplinary Forest Use, Energy, and Livelihoods (FUEL) Lab at the University of Michigan. She also is the director of the National Science Foundation-funded Energy Poverty PIRE in Southern Africa (EPPSA), a five-year collaborative program to support research and training on the topic of energy access in southern Africa. She has worked as a policy research scholar with the World Bank, Resources for the Future, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Center for International Forestry Research.
Jagger is a professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan with a joint appointment in the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy. She earned her doctorate in public policy from Indiana University and her master of science in forest economics and her Bachelor of Arts in economics from the University of Alberta.
The Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy was established in 2011 with the goal of promoting policy-relevant economics research that lies at the boundary between economic sciences and the study of natural or engineered systems. The EEEPI initiative is focused primarily on the union between energy systems and environmental management and the development of quantitative tools to address decision challenges in these areas. View more information on the EEEPI website.