93 lines
8.6 KiB
Text
93 lines
8.6 KiB
Text
## Benin
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* A stable and increasing real GDP growth rates but slow decrease in relative poverty levels.
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* Poverty affects households in poorly educated households in rural areas to much higher levels than urban areas.
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* Education disparities happen mainly along community-level dimensions through high socio-economic segregation of schools and different access to resources.
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* Large disparity of access to electricity between urban and rural households, which directly negatively affects the environmental conditions of individual rural households.
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* No access to electricity due to both lacking rural infrastructure and electrical grid connection costs being too high.
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* Rapid electrification will require both infrastructure expansion and policy commitment to finding ways of lowering grid connection costs.
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-----
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<!-- intro/overall -->
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Benin in recent years has seen fairly stable real GDP growth rates and downward trending poverty levels in absolute terms.
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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].
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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),
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though decreasing below the 2003 level to 37.8 (2018) in its most recent calculation.
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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,
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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,
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with the reduction threatened to be slowed further through increased prices on food and energy [@WorldBank2022b].
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<!-- poverty -->
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Based on its national poverty line, Benin's overall poverty rate is 38.5%,
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though it hides a strong spatial disparity between rural and urban households with 44.2% to 31.4% households in poverty respectively [@WorldBank2022b].
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Looking at the effect of income growth on the time to exit poverty,
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@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%),
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though this aggregate also hides a large heterogeneity primarily determined by a households size, its available human capital and whether it is located rurally.
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So while the study does conclude for an overall equitable pro-poor growth in Benin,
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rural households, beside already being relatively more poverty stricken,
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are in danger of being left further behind during periods of overall growth.
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@Djossou2017 find similar pro-poor growth with spatial disparities but surprisingly see urban households potentially benefiting less than rural households from additional growth,
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with efforts to open up communities to harness the benefits of growth often primarily targeted at rural communities.
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<!-- drivers: endowment/assets: education, ..? -->
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For the household-level factor of education for this disparity,
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the Learning Poverty index shows that in Benin 56% of children at late primary age are not proficient in reading,
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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.
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<!-- TODO These levels are higher than in Uganda, though, since ... gender dimension? -->
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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.
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Here, gender disparities persist, however,
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with girls continuously less likely to attend and adopted girls being at the greatest disadvantage,
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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.
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While the household-level variables do play a role ---
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through the availability of educational resources at home, differences in schooling quality and overall health and well-being ---
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@Gruijters2020 find that most of the disparity stems from the community-level:
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the difference in school quality is large,
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marked by high socio-economic segregation between schools,
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and primarily determined through an unequal distribution of teaching resources including teachers and textbooks.
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<!-- electricity access -->
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Thus, while growth is generally pro-poor in Benin, its primary determinants do not cluster only at the household level,
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but are comprised of partly household-level but especially community-level differences.
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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 ---
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such as access to a safe water source, quality housing materials and electricity ---
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are the primary determinants, ahead even of access to a health facility in the community.
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Access to electricity in the country especially underlies a large heterogeneity based on location.
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The overall level of electrification of Benin has been rising slowly ---
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though outpacing population growth ---
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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,
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there is a broad difference of electrification levels between urban (65%) and rural (17%) regions remaining [@WorldBank2021].
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In rural areas there are generally three approaches to electrification that work outside of a connection to the main grid,
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individual installation of solar panels or generators for smaller electric appliances,
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collective solutions like kiosks offering electric charging for some cost,
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or autonomous mini-grids powering a portion of a more densely populated rural area
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(though often requiring permits or licenses if above certain sizes) [@Jaglin2019].
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@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.
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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,
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leaving behind households which are already neglected within the field of energy access [@Barry2020].
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The former, physical access, is argued by @Djossou2017 as well, emphasizing the need for continued infrastructure expansion to more households,
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in order to provide access to more durable goods (fridges, mobile phones and internet) which can help decrease the inequality gap.
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The latter, prohibitively high costs, should not be disregarded in such an infrastructure expansion as well, however.
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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.
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@Golumbeanu2013 point out the main obstacles that need to be addressed here:
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the lack of incentives to increase electrical affordability,
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a weak utilities commitment toward providing broad electricity access with focus often lying more on high-consumption urban markets,
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often overrated technical specifications for low loads,
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too great distances between households and distribution poles in an area,
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and an overall lack of affordable financing solutions.
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<!-- conclusion -->
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Thus, though having a relatively stable and growing real GDP,
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Benin suffers from slow decreases in its relative poverty rates coupled with a relative stagnation in the inequality of its wealth dispersion.
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Additionally, the country's poverty rates have a high heterogeneity with relatively more rural households and households with poor education in poverty.
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A large part of education disparities happens at the community-level, with schools marked by high socio-economic segregation,
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but household-level disparities, especially environmental ones, playing a role.
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One of those determinants is a household's access to electricity,
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of which there is an enormous disparity between urban and rural households.
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The primary reasons for not having access to electricity are simple physical non-availability with no infrastructure being available in rural areas,
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as well as connection costs to the main electrical grid being too high.
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To decrease the effects of this driving force of inequality,
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both infrastructural expansion as well as policy commitments toward affordable connections to electrical grids are thus of vital importance.
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