7 primary cooking fuel. By contrast, there is a handful of publications examining exclusive users of LPG. Mani et al. (2020) used panel data to examine shifting household fuel use patterns for cooking three years apart in 2015 and 2018. Of the exclusive users of LPG in 2015, one-third had ceased to be exclusive users by 2018, with 10 percent having become minority users. More encouragingly, 46 percent of primary users and 23 percent of minority users in 2015 had become exclusive users by 2018 and the total number of exclusive users had doubled during the intervening years. Thoday et al. (2018) examined the impact of Indonesia’s kerosene-to-LPG conversion subsidy program on abandonment of wood use. Williams et al. (2000) used stove monitors to see if removing all financial barriers to regular use of LPG would see households cook exclusively with LPG in Puno, Peru, and found that fewer than half of the participating households in the study seemed to have done so. Asante et al. (2018) carried out the first systematic evaluation of the Rural LPG Promotion Program in Ghana and did not find exclusive users even in the initial stage of evaluation. After 18 months, only 8 percent of the study participants were still using LPG. In terms of national statistics being made available, Peru’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informática (INEI, National Institute of Statistics and Informatics) published a breakdown of exclusive and nonexclusive users of LPG, natural gas, and electricity by the poverty status every year between 2007 and 2017 (INEI 2018).

This study adds to this limited literature by focusing on LPG as a cooking fuel and abandonment of polluting fuels following adoption of LPG. The study uses national household expenditure surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa to gain a better understanding of patterns of household energy use for cooking with a view to refining government support to household use of LPG. In contrast to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (Kojima 2021c) or Demographic and Health Surveys,<sup>6</sup> which are valuable sources of information about primary cooking, lighting, and heating energy sources but contain no information about energy stacking, data from national household expenditure surveys enable not only calculation of how much households spent on commercial forms of energy but also assessment of whether households had abandoned use of polluting fuels. The study was confined to Sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the largest access gap and therefore the rate of abandonment of polluting fuels and technologies is presumably correspondingly the lowest. Examining the extent of abandonment and incremental costs of doing so could inform policy makers as they consider different forms of support for the purpose of achieving universal access to clean household energy.

# **Study Description**

This study analyzed national household expenditure surveys conducted between 2014 and 2019 in 24 Sub-Saharan African countries. The names of the surveys, dates of data collection, and annual expenditures per capita expressed in 2022 U.S. dollars can be found in annex 1. The countries included those with very large price subsidies for LPG (Angola and Sudan in particular) and those with no price subsidies. LPG users were defined as those with non-zero expenditures on LPG. The questionnaire in Cameroon asked about the possession of LPG stoves and cylinders, and households with such possession were also considered to have been LPG users. Consistent with the definition provided by the World Health Organization, this paper considers electricity, LPG, biogas, solar cookers, and ethanol clean forms of energy—although questions about ethanol were asked only in Nigeria where only a handful of households in urban areas cited ethanol as their primary cooking fuel—and all other fuels are considered polluting, including charcoal and kerosene.

6 https://dhsprogram.com/.