Electrification and Child Work: Direct and Spillover Effects in Ethiopia

While electrification is often promoted for improving adults' labor supply, its effect on child work remains underexplored. Using four waves of Ethiopian panel data, we examine how electrification affects children's work time. By differentiating between households with and without own electricity access within electrified communities, we provide the first evidence separating direct and spillover effects. We find that community electrification reduces children's domestic work time on average, but impacts vary by household access. In electrified communities, children from households without electricity increase unpaid work on household‐owned farms and enterprises. In contrast, children from households with electricity reduce total work time across household enterprises, farms, and domestic chores. Mediation analysis shows that electrification‐induced reductions in work time enable children with household access to increase education time, whereas those without access do not benefit similarly. These findings underscore the importance of last‐mile electrification and of integrating child welfare considerations into infrastructure planning.