Electrification and socioeconomic pathways to women’s empowerment: evidence from renewable energy transitions in the Global South

Electrification is central to sustainable development, yet energy poverty disproportionately affects women. This paper examines how electrification can create socioeconomic pathways to women’s empowerment amid renewable energy transitions in the Global South. Using subnational panel data from 447 regions in 52 developing countries (1990–2019), we show that local power infrastructure is positively associated with women’s household electricity access, with the association more consistent for renewable capacity than for non-renewable capacity. We further show that women’s electricity access is associated with multiple socioeconomic outcomes relevant to empowerment. To identify causal and gender-differentiated effects, we combine individual-level panel data with an instrumental variable strategy in a case study of Malawi, where the national grid is predominantly hydropower-based. The Malawi results show that renewable energy–sourced electrification reallocates women’s time away from unpaid domestic, agricultural, and casual work and toward paid work, non-agricultural businesses, formal employment, entrepreneurship, and human capital accumulation, with no comparable systematic gains for men. Our findings indicate that expanding affordable and clean energy (SDG 7) can improve women’s multidimensional well-being and strengthen the socioeconomic conditions that may enable women’s empowerment.