Pre-paid meters and household electricity use behaviours: evidence from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

In low-income countries such as Ethiopia, pre-paid metering offers the potential to alleviate several typical challenges with traditional electricity billing systems, including high non-payment rate, pilferage and fraud, administrative and enforcement costs for utilities, and inflexibility and incongruence of bills with the irregular income flow of poorer consumers. Despite increasing adoption of pre-paid metering technology, few studies examine its impacts on household behaviour. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining impacts on electricity consumption, ownership of appliances, level of satisfaction, and cooking behaviour in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.