Working Paper 57: The Impact of School-Level Electrification on Secondary Schooling Outcomes in Kenya

The program was part of REA's Strategic Plan to connect all public facilities to electricity. By 2003, only 285 public secondary schools had access to electricity, but by November 2012, it was predicted that 100 percent of public secondary schools in Kenya would be electrified. The rollout of school-level electricity connections was not random, and researchers used a test developed by de Janvry, McIntosh, and Sadoulet (2010) to demonstrate that the sequence of connections was not endogenous to the schooling outcomes of interest. Additionally, letters exchanged by the electrification authority with key decision makers in each constituency were investigated to further establish the timing of the connections. A differences-in-differences approach was used to analyze the impact of school-level electrification on secondary schooling outcomes. The approach incorporated school and year fixed effects and took advantage of the rapid rollout of public secondary school electricity connections. The data assembled for the analysis included administrative data from western Kenya, letters data, and school survey data. The results of the analysis found no evidence of any impacts from school-level electrification on the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE)-related outcomes. Specifically, there was no significant impact on the number of students taking the KCSE examination or on exam scores. The analysis also explored the ways in which schools are using electricity based on original surveys of secondary school principals conducted in 2017. The surveys revealed that electricity reliability continues to be a reported challenge for many schools, with over half of schools experiencing blackouts in the last three days. The findings suggest that while school-level electrification may not have had a direct impact on educational outcomes, the reliability of electricity remains a critical issue for many schools in Kenya.