Gender, Mobility, and Energy Poverty at the Informal Transport Frontier: Female Patronage of Okada and Keke NAPEP in Ibadan and Enugu
Year: 2026
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Transport and energy poverty are structurally intertwined in peri-urban sub-Saharan Africa, yet the gendered dimensions of this intersection are almost entirely absent from the peer-reviewed literature. Women in Nigerian periurban settlements face a compound mobility burden: they disproportionately undertake care-related trips across fragmented transport networks, allocate higher shares of household budgets to transport (relative to income) than men, and experience informal transport, specifically okada (commercial motorcycles) and keke NAPEP (auto rickshaws), through distinctive safety, affordability, and social norm constraints that are invisible in gender disaggregated modal share data alone. This study develops and applies an intersectional gender energy mobility framework to analyze the determinants and consequences of female patronage of okada and keke NAPEP in peri urban Ibadan (Oyo State) and Enugu (Enugu State), Nigeria. Data were derived from a mixed-methods household survey of 960 female- and maleheaded households (480 per city), supplemented by 48 in-depth interviews with female commuters and 12 focus group discussions with female transport users and motorcycle operators. A probit model of mode choice (okada vs. keke NAPEP vs. walking/other) is estimated on the survey data, and TEES indicator, a novel metric that captures the share of household energy budget absorbed by motorized transport, is used to measure energy poverty exposure. The key findings are as follows: Women are significantly less likely than men to use okada (probit AME = −0.218; p < 0.001), primarily due to safety concerns (cited by 79.4% of female non-users) and social norm constraints (cited by 63.2% in Enugu vs. 41.8% in Ibadan). Women who rely exclusively on walking absorb the highest non-monetary mobility burden: they spend a mean of 94.3 min per day on on-foot trips, representing significant time and energy poverty. Female keke NAPEP users face a TEES of 28.4% of household income, nearly double the 15.2% faced by male okada users, constituting transport energy poverty by the 20% threshold widely used in fuel poverty research. Intersectional analysis reveals that widowed, low-income, uneducated women in Enugu face the most severe energy poverty due to compound mobility. These findings call for a gender-responsive informal transport policy that integrates safety certification, female-friendly aeke design, and fare subsidy mechanisms within a broader energy poverty analytical framework.
Author: Abubakar Zakariyya Al-Hasan
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213499321