Electric Power For Rural Growth by Douglas F. Barnes

Author:Douglas F. Barnes [Barnes, Douglas F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367162108
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

Education and Literacy

The role of education and literacy in rural development has been an important and somewhat controversial issue in the development literature. Many consider education to be a prime mover of development (Lerner 1958; Schultz 1964). The consensus is that literacy and education are fundamental for a society's advancement to higher levels of development and a more complex division of labor. However, some had questioned whether literacy is the cause or the effect of development (Barnes, Fliegel, and Vanneman 1982). Regardless of the direction of causality, no one would question that education is one of the key "human-capital" inputs for societies at higher levels of development.

A common finding among rural electrification studies was that rural electrification, income and education were all positively related (Madigan 1981; Madigan, Herrin, and Mulcahy 1976; Herrin 1979; Saunders et al. 1978). These studies implied that electrification was one of the causes of higher income and educational levels. However, an alternative explanation might have been that wealthy households who were better able to afford electricity probably adopted the service at a higher rate than poorer households. In this study, it was possible to control for income in the Colombia household analysis and for village level of agricultural development in the India study. Therefore, the relationship of rural electrification, level of development and education can be disentangled.

Electric lighting is attractive for educated adults and families with school-aged children because it allows for reading during evening hours. In both India and Colombia, the study findings showed that rural electrification led to higher levels of children reading at night. In addition, rural schools and teachers may have been more likely to locate in communities with electricity, thereby providing the infrastructure for increasing rural literacy over the long term. Thus, if rural electrification stimulates the growth of education, and if highly educated adults are more likely to adopt an electricity connection, then rural electrification may well be both a cause and an effect of rural literacy.

In India and Colombia, households or communities with electricity had higher levels of literacy and education. In India, the average proportion of literacy in villages without electricity was 19 percent (table 5.10). The figure was slightly lower for newly electrified villages, but improved for villages that had had electricity for longer. The number of children attending school as a percentage of total schoolaged children no doubt had long-term consequences for the rural literacy rate. While village leaders may have exaggerated the number of children attending school, school attendance mirrored the literacy rates from the census materials. Among households that had had electricity for less than 5 years or were without electricity, less than half of eligible children attended school, while well over half of eligible children attended school in villages that had had electricity 6 or more years.

The relationship between rural electrification and education was quite similar for India and Colombia, but the level of education in Colombia was substantially higher than in India. However, as in India, the level of education for the Colombia sample improved significantly with years of electrification.

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