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.