Abstract
This study contributes to the literature on the SDG7 by examining the impact of energy poverty on education inequality in Africa. Specifically, it assesses Kuznets’ inverted-U curve and answers the question of whether there is a heterogeneous effect of access to electricity on education inequality. On a panel of 34 African countries for the period spanning 2010 to 2019, the study employs the PCSE, IV-GMM, and method of moments quantile regression (MM-QR) technique. The findings show that (1) there is validation of Kuznets’ inverted-U curve hypothesis, (2) access to electricity is significant in reducing education inequality, and (3) there is a negative and statistically significant heterogeneous effect of access to electricity on education inequality across African countries, and this is captured through the difference in the effect across quantiles. Given the above, this study recommends that African countries with low access to electricity should invest more in electricity facilities to reduce education inequality.