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Publication de l’article Pay with your phone and light your home: mobile money as a catalyst for off-grid electrification in Tanzania par Mamadou Saliou Barry, Anna Creti & Alpha Ly dans la revue Applied Economics.
Globally, 725 million people are without electricity, of whom about 83% (600 million) live in sub-Saharan Africa. Significant barriers identified include lack of affordability and of access to financial services and credit and constraints on saving. This paper studies how the adoption of mobile money affects households’ decision to buy electricity-producing solar panels in Tanzania. Combining a logit model and an entropy balancing approach to account for the potential endogeneity issue, we find that mobile money services have a positive effect on solar panel adoption. Our results suggest that households using mobile money are 5.7% points more likely to adopt solar panels than those not using it. Furthermore, we examine the heterogeneous effects of mobile money adoption with respect to households’ poverty and house ownership status, and whether they include migrants. We find that the effects are more significant for poor households than those considered non-poor, for households with migrants than those without, and for homeowners than tenants. Finally, our analysis reveals that the reception of remittances, access to credit, participation in off-farm income-generating activities, and savings serve as mediating channels through which mobile money influences the likelihood of adopting solar panels.