Household Expenditure Pressure and Electricity Access in Rural Kitui County, Kenya

Abstract

Electricity infrastructure can be physically available while remaining financially inaccessible to rural households whose budgets are dominated by essential consumption. This study examines household expenditure as a demand-side determinant of electricity access in rural Kitui County, Kenya. It isolates the household-expenditure objective from a wider study of socioeconomic factors and asks whether expenditure pressure and household budgeting capacity are associated with the ability to connect to and sustain electricity services. An explanatory cross-sectional design was used, drawing on 380 usable household questionnaires from a target population of 262,942 rural households. Household expenditure was measured using ten Likert- scale items capturing essential-needs spending, expenditure pressure, budgeting capacity and electricity-related affordability. The expenditure construct recorded a high composite mean (M = 4.3221, SD = 0.40607). Principal component analysis produced a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value of .905 and a significant Bartlett's test (χ² = 1261.606, df = 45, p < .001). Two components with eigenvalues above one jointly explained 55.758% of the variance, indicating that expenditure constraints contain both a broad affordability-pressure dimension and a more immediate essential-expenditure burden. In the multivariate model, household expenditure had a positive and statistically significant association with electricity access (B = .041, β = .266, t = 6.270, p < .001), controlling for household access to credit and living conditions. A supplementary PROCESS Model 4 analysis showed that poverty did not significantly mediate this relationship because the bootstrapped indirect-effect interval included zero (a×b = -.0043; 95% Boot CI [-.0106, .0010]). The findings suggest that rural electricity access is shaped by immediate household resource-allocation and affordability conditions that are not reducible to poverty status alone. Policy should therefore combine infrastructure expansion with payment flexibility, connection-cost relief and household affordability measures.