Infrastructure development and community wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa: A structural equation modeling – based contribution from Cameroon

ABSTRACT

Infrastructure development’s contribution to community wellbeing in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is largely unknown. Existing scholarship over-represents externally funded projects, sidelining micro-level initiatives. Empirical studies hardly apply Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approaches that estimate wellbeing as a composite function of infrastructure development. We review the topical literature on infrastructure development and community wellbeing in SSA. We find positive effects of infrastructure development on community wellbeing in SSA. SEM was not applied in any reviewed case study. We then use the Partial Least Square Structural Equation Model (PLS – SEM) to assess the impacts of multiple micro-level infrastructure projects on community wellbeing in Cameroon. All four examined micro-projects had positive effects on community wellbeing. However, only the effects of two projects (hospitals and schools) were statistically significant. The study recommends more SEM-based studies as prerequisite to disentangling composite wellbeing benefits of infrastructure development in SSA, with cost efficiency and outcome-optimizing implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• community wellbeing
• PLS-SEM
• Cameroon
• sub-Saharan Africa

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the contributions of FEICOM management and community members in providing relevant data for the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15575330.2023.2248256

Notes

1. Despite growing research across many disciplines, the issue of a unified definition of wellbeing is still unresolved (Williams, 2010). In general, two approaches to conceptualizing and defining wellbeing exist: (1) objective wellbeing grounded in the eudaimonic tradition, which focuses on what people have that can be measured, such as changes in objects, income, school enrollment, and poverty reduction (Dodge et al., 2012); and (2) the hedonic tradition accentuated along subjective, cognitive, and affective constructs such as satisfaction with life, happiness, desires, and preferences (Canaviri, 2016; Olsaretti, 2006) – what McNaught (2011) calls a desirable human state. Subjective wellbeing is largely intangible, psychological, and difficult to measure (Thomas, 2009) compared to objective wellbeing. Increasingly, wellbeing scholars contend that it is a multi-dimensional construct that combines objective and subjective components and can render evaluations of wellbeing more complete (La Placa et al., 2013; Williams, 2010). The current study models objective well-being, implicitly assuming the subjective dimension.

2. In its broadest sense, public infrastructure includes multiple sectors such as electricity (Gregory & Sovacool, 2019), roads (Krüger et al., 2021; Ngezahayo et al., 2019), dams (Björnlund & Simm, 2019), agriculture (Abegunde et al., 2019), ICT (Fambeu, 2021), public service (Arimoro, 2022), water (Dangui & Jia, 2022), education (Chikoko & Mthembu, 2020) and health (Babalola & Moodley, 2020). This review is restricted to the last four infrastructure categories, as they constitute the focus of this contribution.