Household's use of cooking gas and Children's learning outcomes in rural Ghana

Children in Sub-Saharan Africa spend a non-trivial amount of their time cooking and collecting fuel for domestic use. This is particularly the case in rural areas where access to efficient energy is low, and children’s academic performance is poor. This paper argues that households' use of cooking gas could reduce the time spent doing domestic chores, increase learning time, and improve children's school performance. We investigate this proposition using the Ghana Living Standards Survey data. We employ different instrumental variable estimations techniques to deal with the possible endogeneity problem. The results show that cooking with gas marginally improves the learning outcome of children in rural Ghana. Our results imply that the adoption of cooking gas could enhance human capital development in developing countries. •This paper investigated the effect of liquified petroleum gas use on the learning outcome of primary school children.•We used the Ghana Living Standards Survey and different econometric techniques in our analysis.•Our results show that LPG use marginally improves children’s ability to read, write, and solve simple mathematics problems.•Additional analyses show that reduced time on fuel collection is a potential channel of the observed effect.•Our results imply that the adoption of cooking gas could improve human capital development in developing countries.