Urban street-lighting grid extension and night-time women's market stall operating hours in Tanzanian municipal wards: a boundary-discontinuity estimation of feeder-line proximity
Description
Street-lighting grid extension is typically evaluated by counting connected premises, yet the outcome that matters for women who trade after dark is the length of the working night at market stalls whose access to the feeder line is discontinuous. The design is specified for municipal wards in Tanzania, where feeder-line extension proceeds premise by premise and where women's stalls cluster along the same streets. It then calibrates the design against the DHS Program indicator 'Mother's first postnatal checkup: Less than 4 hours' (RH_PCMT_W_L4H), using 82 country-survey observations from 33 African countries between 2005 and 2025, with a mean of 39.187 and a standard deviation of 20.446. That calibration is used only to fix the sample-size and precision arithmetic that a ward-level study would need; it is not a substitute for the stall-level data the design requires. The contribution is a transferable specification for evaluating lighting-grid extension as a boundary phenomenon rather than a binary treatment.
Notes
Files
article.pdf
Additional details
Related works
- Is identical to
- Journal article: https://parj.africa/ajis_urbandev/article/view/urban-street-lighting-grid-extension-and-night-time-women-s (URL)
References
- Ahmed, S., Creanga, A. A., Gillespie, D. G., and Tsui, A. O. (2021). Maternal and neonatal health in sub-Saharan Africa: progress and challenges. The Lancet Global Health, 9(4), e489-e500.
- Aklin, M., Bayer, P., Harish, S. P., and Urpelainen, J. (2017). Does basic energy access generate socioeconomic benefits? A field experiment with off-grid solar power in India. Science Advances, 3(5), e1602153.
- Calonico, S., Cattaneo, M. D., and Titiunik, R. (2014). Robust nonparametric confidence intervals for regression-discontinuity designs. Econometrica, 82(6), 2295-2326.
- Chen, M. A., and Carré, F. (2020). The informal economy revisited: examining the past, envisioning the future. Routledge.
- Imbens, G. W., and Lemieux, T. (2008). Regression discontinuity designs: a guide to practice. Journal of Econometrics, 142(2), 615-635.
- Kumar, S., and Rauniyar, G. (2018). The impact of rural electrification on women's empowerment in India. Journal of Development Studies, 54(9), 1587-1604.
- Lee, D. S., and Lemieux, T. (2010). Regression discontinuity designs in economics. Journal of Economic Literature, 48(2), 281-355.
- Mdee, A. (2019). The politics of urban water and sanitation in Tanzania. Oxford University Press.
- Moser, C. O. N. (2017). Gender transformation in a new global urban agenda: challenges for Habitat III and beyond. Environment and Urbanization, 29(1), 221-236.
- Tacoli, C. (2012). Urbanization, gender and urban poverty: paid work and unpaid carework in the city. Urbanization and Emerging Population Issues Working Paper 7, International Institute for Environment and Development.
- World Bank. (2022). Tracking SDG 7: the energy progress report. World Bank.