* A stable and increasing real GDP growth rates but slow decrease in relative poverty levels.
* Poverty affects households in poorly educated households in rural areas to much higher levels than urban areas.
* Education disparities happen mainly along community-level dimensions through high socio-economic segregation of schools and different access to resources.
* Large disparity of access to electricity between urban and rural households, which directly negatively affects the environmental conditions of individual rural households.
* No access to electricity due to both lacking rural infrastructure and electrical grid connection costs being too high.
* Rapid electrification will require both infrastructure expansion and policy commitment to finding ways of lowering grid connection costs.
Benin in recent years has seen fairly stable real GDP growth rates and downward trending poverty levels in absolute terms.
Its growth rate averaged 6.4% for the years 2017 to 2019 and, with a decrease during the intermittent years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, has recovered to a rate of 6.6% in 2021 [@WorldBank2022b].
There only exists sporadic and highly fluctuating data on the country's overall inequality, with the World Bank Development Index noting a Gini coefficient of 38.6 for the year (2003) before rising to 43.4 (2011) and up to 47.8 (2015),
though decreasing below the 2003 level to 37.8 (2018) in its most recent calculation.
At the same time, the country's poverty rate, even measured based on the international line, only decreased at a very slow rate in its most recent years,
from a relative rate of households in poverty at 18.8% in 2019, to 18.7% in 2020 and 18.3% at the end of 2021,
with the reduction threatened to be slowed further through increased prices on food and energy [@WorldBank2022b].
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Based on its national poverty line, Benin's overall poverty rate is 38.5%,
though it hides a strong spatial disparity between rural and urban households with 44.2% to 31.4% households in poverty respectively [@WorldBank2022b].
Looking at the effect of income growth on the time to exit poverty,
@Alia2017 finds a general negative correlation with stronger growth indeed leading to shorter average exit times (7-10 years for a household at a per capita growth rate of 4.2%),
though this aggregate also hides a large heterogeneity primarily determined by a households size, its available human capital and whether it is located rurally.
So while the study does conclude for an overall equitable pro-poor growth in Benin,
rural households, beside already being relatively more poverty stricken,
are in danger of being left further behind during periods of overall growth.
@Djossou2017 find similar pro-poor growth with spatial disparities but surprisingly see urban households potentially benefiting less than rural households from additional growth,
with efforts to open up communities to harness the benefits of growth often primarily targeted at rural communities.
For the household-level factor of education for this disparity,
the Learning Poverty index shows that in Benin 56% of children at late primary age are not proficient in reading,
55% do not achieve minimum proficiency levels at the end of primary school and 3% of primary school-aged children are not enrolled in school at all.
<!-- TODO These levels are higher than in Uganda, though, since ... gender dimension? -->
Looking purely at attendance rates, @McNabb2018 finds that the primary household-level determinants of attendance are the wealth of a household, its religion, as well as the education level of its household head.
Here, gender disparities persist, however,
with girls continuously less likely to attend and adopted girls being at the greatest disadvantage,
while boy tend to face higher opportunity costs than girls due to often working in the fields in which case the distance to a school begins to play an important role.
While the household-level variables do play a role ---
through the availability of educational resources at home, differences in schooling quality and overall health and well-being ---
@Gruijters2020 find that most of the disparity stems from the community-level:
the difference in school quality is large,
marked by high socio-economic segregation between schools,
and primarily determined through an unequal distribution of teaching resources including teachers and textbooks.
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Thus, while growth is generally pro-poor in Benin, its primary determinants do not cluster only at the household level,
but are comprised of partly household-level but especially community-level differences.
One of the foremost examples of the effects of inequal endowments can have is brought by @VanDePoel2009 when they look at the determinants of rural infant death rates in Benin among others and find that environmental factors ---
such as access to a safe water source, quality housing materials and electricity ---
are the primary determinants, ahead even of access to a health facility in the community.
Access to electricity in the country especially underlies a large heterogeneity based on location.
The overall level of electrification of Benin has been rising slowly ---
though outpacing population growth ---
from 22% in 2000 to 26% in 2005, 34% in 2010, a regression to 30% in 2015 and a faster increase to 40% in 2019, however,
there is a broad difference of electrification levels between urban (65%) and rural (17%) regions remaining [@WorldBank2021].
In rural areas there are generally three approaches to electrification that work outside of a connection to the main grid,
individual installation of solar panels or generators for smaller electric appliances,
collective solutions like kiosks offering electric charging for some cost,
or autonomous mini-grids powering a portion of a more densely populated rural area
(though often requiring permits or licenses if above certain sizes) [@Jaglin2019].
@Rateau2022 see one of the primary reasons for off-grid electrification in either physical unavailability in rural areas or a prohibitively high cost for connection to the grid.
However, these more individualized solutions are often only targeted at credit-worthy customers and can lead to a further increase in inequalities between income percentiles,
leaving behind households which are already neglected within the field of energy access [@Barry2020].
The former, physical access, is argued by @Djossou2017 as well, emphasizing the need for continued infrastructure expansion to more households,
in order to provide access to more durable goods (fridges, mobile phones and internet) which can help decrease the inequality gap.
The latter, prohibitively high costs, should not be disregarded in such an infrastructure expansion as well, however.
One of the major obstacles to main grid connection remains the high charge a customer is expected to pay with solutions requiring continued political commitment to identify, examine and implement more low-cost electrification processes as well as financing solutions.
@Golumbeanu2013 point out the main obstacles that need to be addressed here:
the lack of incentives to increase electrical affordability,
a weak utilities commitment toward providing broad electricity access with focus often lying more on high-consumption urban markets,
often overrated technical specifications for low loads,
too great distances between households and distribution poles in an area,
and an overall lack of affordable financing solutions.
Thus, though having a relatively stable and growing real GDP,
Benin suffers from slow decreases in its relative poverty rates coupled with a relative stagnation in the inequality of its wealth dispersion.
Additionally, the country's poverty rates have a high heterogeneity with relatively more rural households and households with poor education in poverty.
A large part of education disparities happens at the community-level, with schools marked by high socio-economic segregation,
but household-level disparities, especially environmental ones, playing a role.
One of those determinants is a household's access to electricity,
of which there is an enormous disparity between urban and rural households.
The primary reasons for not having access to electricity are simple physical non-availability with no infrastructure being available in rural areas,
as well as connection costs to the main electrical grid being too high.
To decrease the effects of this driving force of inequality,
both infrastructural expansion as well as policy commitments toward affordable connections to electrical grids are thus of vital importance.
