Choice experiment study on the willingness to pay to improve

Modern forms of energy are an important vehicle towards poverty alleviation in rural areas of developing countries. Most developing countries’ households heavily rely on wood fuel which impact their health and social–economic status. To ease such a dependency, other modern forms of energy, namely electricity, need to be provided. However, the quality of the electricity service, namely reliability, is an important factor in reducing this dependency. This paper discusses a choice experiment valuation study conducted among electrified rural households located in Kisumu, Kenya, in which the willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid power outages or blackouts was estimated. A mixed logit estimation was applied to identify the various socio-economic and demographic characteristics which determine preferences to reduce power outages among a household’s users. In conclusion, several of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics outlined in this paper were identified and can assist service differentiation to accommodate the diverse households’ preferences towards the improvement of the electricity service.The authors are grateful to the Royal Economic Society (RES) for the small expenses budget provided in this study. They also acknowledge the financial support from the Department of Education of the Basque Government through grant IT-334-07 (UPV/EHU Econometrics Research Group) and from Spanish Ministerio de Educación and FEDER (SEJ2007-61362)