Grid access cuts solar adoption odds in Cameroon, study finds
Households in Cameroon that are connected to the national electricity grid are markedly less likely to install rooftop solar systems than those left off the network, according to a new analysis of survey data collected across the country in 2024. The study, published in the journal Discover Energy, estimates that grid access reduces the probability of residential solar photovoltaic adoption by 25.3 percentage points, making it the single strongest predictor the researchers measured. Rural residence, by contrast, raised the adoption probability by 9.3 percentage points. Together, the two findings point to a striking conclusion: in Cameroon today, household solar power is functioning less as a green supplement for already electrified homes and more as a lifeline for communities the grid has never reached.
The research team, led by Parfait Gildas Ngouabe, with Henri Ndame Makembe and Novice Patrick Bakehe, drew on the Afrobarometer Round 10 survey conducted in Cameroon in 2024. Their sample covered 1,192 households, stratified to represent both urban and rural settings. Of these, 150 households had adopted solar PV systems while 1,050 had not, yielding a national adoption rate of 12.5 percent. That figure, the authors argue, marks a significant upward trajectory for decentralized renewable energy in a country where solar panels accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the national energy mix before 2021. The recent commissioning of modular solar PV plants in Cameroon’s northern regions, including facilities at Guider and Maroua that added more than 30 megawatts of capacity, signals growing institutional interest in solar at the utility scale. But the household-level picture, the study shows, is driven by very different forces.
To untangle those forces, the researchers estimated a robust binary probit model, a statistical approach suited to a yes-or-no outcome such as whether a household adopts solar. The model treated adoption as the result of a latent, unobserved propensity shaped by location, age, gender, grid access, economic security, education, and ownership of information and communication technologies such as radios, televisions, and mobile phones. An interaction term between rural location and wealth tested whether the drivers of adoption differ across the urban-rural divide. Because cross-sectional household surveys often suffer from heteroscedasticity, meaning the variability of the outcome differs across observations, the team used robust standard errors to keep their estimates consistent. They then converted the raw coefficients into average marginal effects, which express each factor’s influence as a change in the actual probability of adoption, a form far easier for policymakers to interpret than a probit coefficient.
The model performed well by the usual diagnostic standards, with a Wald chi-squared statistic of 139.35 on 14 degrees of freedom, significant at the 0.001 level, and a pseudo R-squared of 0.1805. But the headline result was the grid. Holding all other factors constant, access to the national electricity grid cut the probability of solar adoption by 25.3 percentage points, an effect significant at the 0.001 level. The descriptive statistics foreshadowed this pattern: only 41.3 percent of solar adopters were connected to the grid, whereas 81.7 percent of non-adopters were. In the authors’ framing, residential solar in Cameroon currently operates as a strict off-grid substitute rather than a complementary power source for grid-connected households. That distinction matters for energy policy, because it suggests solar uptake in the country is being propelled by energy poverty and infrastructure gaps rather than by environmental preference among consumers who already enjoy reliable electricity.
Geography told a parallel story. A striking 82 percent of adopting households live in rural areas, compared with only 44.7 percent of non-adopters, a difference the study reports as highly significant. Rural residence independently raised the adoption probability by 9.3 percentage points in the multivariate model. The spatial divide is grounded in Cameroon’s broader energy landscape. The paper notes that while more than 90 percent of the urban population has electricity access, rural access stagnates at around 25 percent, and less than 5 percent of rural residents use clean cooking energy. The country’s electricity system, heavily dependent on hydroelectric and thermal plants, has struggled with aging transmission infrastructure, underused productive capacity, and seasonal drops in water levels that weaken hydroelectric output during the dry season, leaving demand chronically outstripping supply. For rural households far from any remedy to those deficits, a standalone solar panel is often the only route to electricity at all.
Education emerged as the second major engine of adoption. Respondents with secondary education showed an 8.8 percentage point higher probability of adopting solar PV than those with no formal education, while those with tertiary education showed an 11.8 percentage point higher probability, both significant at the 0.05 level. More intriguing was what the interaction terms revealed: the positive effects of secondary and tertiary education were substantially amplified in rural areas, with the rural boost reaching statistical significance at the 0.1 and 0.05 levels respectively. The researchers interpret this through the Diffusion of Innovations framework, the classic account of how new technologies spread through a social system, first articulated by Everett Rogers. In regions with poor infrastructure, they argue, higher education acts as a decisive catalyst for overcoming information barriers, giving households the capacity to process technical details and weigh the long-term economic benefits of solar against its high upfront cost.
Information access itself proved influential. Owning a radio increased the adoption probability by 4.3 percentage points, significant at the 0.05 level, and adopters were indeed more likely to own radios than non-adopters, 78.7 percent versus 68.8 percent. Television ownership produced one of the study’s more subtle findings. In the raw bivariate comparison, TV owners were significantly less likely to adopt solar, 63.3 percent of adopters versus 74.8 percent of non-adopters, a pattern the authors attribute to the technical limits of basic solar systems, which easily power low-voltage devices but struggle to run energy-intensive appliances without high-capacity battery storage. Yet once wealth, education, and grid access were held constant in the probit model, television ownership flipped to a positive marginal effect of 4.4 percentage points, significant at the 0.1 level. The reversal suggests TV ownership proxies for both information exposure and demand for modern energy services, with actual adoption hinging on whether the household can afford the battery storage needed to run such appliances.
Economic security, measured as an index, added a positive but only marginally significant effect, with each step on the index raising the adoption probability by 1.6 percentage points. Notably, the sociodemographic variables that dominate much of the international literature, age and gender, showed no statistically significant association with adoption in the robust specification. The bivariate data had hinted otherwise, with female respondents significantly underrepresented among adopters, 40 percent versus 51 percent among non-adopters, but that pattern dissolved once structural and economic factors were controlled for. The authors read this as evidence that in the current Cameroonian context, structural barriers such as grid accessibility, household wealth, and educational attainment override individual demographic traits in the energy transition decision. It is a finding that contrasts with earlier studies, some of which reported negative relationships between age or female household headship and solar adoption.
The study is candid about its limits. It relies on cross-sectional data, which captures a single moment in time and cannot establish how adoption evolves as circumstances change, and it lacks variables for solar equipment prices, government financial incentives, or the reliability of grid electricity, such as the frequency of blackouts. Those omissions matter, since an unreliable grid could plausibly push connected households toward solar in ways this dataset cannot detect. The authors call for future work incorporating such supply-side and quality factors, ideally with panel data that tracks households over time. Still, the policy implications they draw are direct. Because solar PV primarily serves the unelectrified, they argue, policymakers and development agencies should prioritize rural, off-grid communities for solar interventions. And because the initial capital expenditure of a reliable system remains prohibitive for many rural households, general awareness campaigns alone will not suffice. They recommend targeted economic instruments, including subsidies for solar components and localized microcredit schemes, alongside radio broadcasts and educational networks to disseminate technical knowledge and reduce information asymmetry. In a country of roughly 30 million people where the rural-urban electricity divide remains stark, the analysis suggests the solar transition will be won or lost not in connected cities but in the villages the grid has yet to reach.
Subject of Research: Socioeconomic and infrastructure drivers of residential solar photovoltaic adoption among households in Cameroon
Article Title: Socioeconomic drivers of solar PV adoption in Cameroon
Article References: Ngouabe, P. G., Ndame Makembe, H., & Bakehe, N. P. (2026). Socioeconomic drivers of solar PV adoption in Cameroon. Discover Energy, 6(1), Article 101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43937-026-00206-8
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s43937-026-00206-8
Keywords: solar energy, photovoltaics, Cameroon, grid access, rural electrification, energy poverty, Afrobarometer, probit model, education, ICT access, sub-Saharan Africa, renewable energy policy
News Source: Faith Mcneil. (November 6, 2026). Grid access cuts solar adoption odds in Cameroon, study finds. Scienmag.
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