Infrastructure-human development nexus is a multidimensional one. Infrastructure services impact human development by enhancing human capabilities through health and education; creating opportunities through poverty reduction and empowerment; and ensuring human security through reducing risks and vulnerabilities.
Infrastructure contributes to all these directly and indirectly. For example, infrastructures help enhance human capabilities by directly improving access of people to health and educational services. But it also contributes to human capabilities indirectly.
For example, improved access to infrastructure services can also free up significant amounts of time as rural households, especially women and young girls, spend a large part of their day on collection of water and firewood. Easy access to potable water and energy results in time-savings that can be used for productive as well as reproductive, and educational or leisure activities.
Infrastructure-health linkages
Having access to clean sources of potable water ensures safe access to sanitation services and prevents parasitic infections. A survey of 49 studies on diarrhoeal morbidity showed an average 22% reduction, with the 19 most rigorous of those studies showing a 26% reduction as a result of improved water and sanitation.
Estimates show that in South America, bringing water and sanitation coverage to 100% would decrease the child mortality due to diarrhoea by 22%; in South Asia and West Africa, it would decrease by 21%.
When transportation costs are high, or health centres are hard to reach, many poor people stop seeking health care altogether. In Jamaica, 73% of women reported that mobility was a problem with respect to access to prenatal healthcare services. About 12% of African people, according to a 1995 household survey, reported that the unavailability or high cost of transport was the major barrier to obtaining health care.
ICT-based services can help to improve health by allowing health care providers to exchange information over the phone or over the Internet, reducing inefficient expenditures of time and resources and improving the ability of health care providers to identify the most effective treatments.
Widespread use of unclean energy sources severely damages the health of the poor. More than 130,000 premature deaths and 50-70 million incidents of respiratory illness occur each year due to episodes of urban air pollution in developing countries.
Without electricity, health clinics cannot safely administer vaccines or perform operations. Electrification or provision of liquid fuels, which provide more controlled flame than biomass fuel, can significantly reduce household injuries and accidents such as burns and poisoning among the poor.
More effective transport between rural communities and urban centres can help make it easier to establish and staff health-care centres and to give them adequate support. Improving access to clean water through better transportation reduces intestinal disease and child mortality.
Infrastructure-education linkages
Good transportation links reduce the time it takes to go to school. Better roads and transportation can improve the enrolment ratios. In many cases, particularly in remote areas, children cannot go to school when easy transportation means are not available to them. Improved roads and transportation have major implications for girls’ education. Adequate transport lowers the cost and increases effectiveness of other support for school services.
Having access to potable water reduces involuntary absenteeism and improves educational performance of children. Data from a rural Indian household survey showed that by doubling the number of families with access to a water tap and a well, the school attendance index would rise by 20%.
One of the major uses of energy by the poor is for lighting. Collecting traditional fuel (usually done by children) is time consuming and operating it is expensive and inefficient. Lack of electricity prevents access to information from the outside world through the use of modern educational tools, such as radio or computers.
Communities that lack access to modern sources of electricity are at a serious educational disadvantage. By connecting households and schools to electricity, energy projects can help increase the amount of time that children can study or read, improving educational performance.
Innovative teaching strategies due to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) have been credited with improved test scores and other learning benefits to students in many studies. ICT-based services can also be used to deliver education to children in rural areas and allow for discussions and exchanges between people separated by large distances.
Infrastructure-poverty reduction linkages
Poverty reduction requires economic growth which, when accompanied by sound macro-economic management and good governance, results in sustainable and socially inclusive development.
The impacts of infrastructures on economic growth and poverty reduction occur in a multiplier way -- there are first-round effects, followed by subsequent impacts. The first-round impacts on poverty reduction are more direct, while the subsequent effects, realized through fiscal and private spending channels, are broader and more general.
In the first round, there are two initial impacts of development of infrastructure that could lead to poverty reduction through economic growth. These are supply-side and demand-side effects.
On the supply-side, improved infrastructure services in terms of costs, availability and reliability could create at least two types of linkage effects: Investment-inducement effect and regional economy activation effect.
Through the first channel, new investment is generated by an enhanced business climate. Attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic investment could promote industrial growth and generate jobs and incomes at newly-invested firms and in related industries and services through increased procurement of local inputs and services.
Through the second channel, new economic opportunities are opened up and productivity of the existing economic activities is enhanced -- even without additional investment.
For example, better access to markets and information could generate jobs and income in rural households through improved agricultural productivity, diversification of agricultural products and promotion of off-farm industry in rural areas.
On the demand side, it is possible to expect the effective demand effect of infrastructure construction. This is a channel through which jobs and income are generated by implementing the project itself.
For example, effective demand from construction work would generate jobs and income during the construction period directly and indirectly through the procurement of local inputs and services.
In the social dimension, better infrastructure services (particularly, the availability of transport and power supply) could increase access to basic social or public services and thus improve the living conditions of the poor.
Investment in infrastructure services can contribute to growth (and thus poverty alleviation) by:
- reducing transaction costs and facilitating trade flows within and across borders;
- enabling economic players to respond to new types of demand in different places;
- lowering the costs of inputs used in the production of almost all goods and services;
- opening up new opportunities for entrepreneurs or making existing businesses more profitable;
- providing employment in public works both as social protection and as a counter-cyclical policy in times of recession;
- enhancing human capital, for example, by improving access to schools and health centres
One of the major impacts of infrastructure is employment creation. Labour-intensive technologies in infrastructure create jobs for people. This is quite evident in road-building technologies.
In capital-intensive road technology options, equipment typically represents 80% of the total cost, while the labour costs are only about 10% to 12%. For the labour-intensive option, the equipment would represent about 30% to 40% of the total cost, while labour costs would be 50% to 60%. Labour will be mainly unskilled or semi-skilled, often offering opportunities to women.
Dr Selim Jahan is Former Director, Human Development Report Office and Poverty Division, United Nations Development Program, New York, USA.P
