investment accrue to a greater degree for women than for men (DHS sample). Our results also suggest that younger adults and those in middle age benefit more from infrastructure investments.

By 2035 Africa’s working age population is expected to grow by 450 million people, an increase of close to 70 percent. Forecasts indicate that the number of people of working age will grow faster than the number of jobs available for them (World Economic Forum, World Bank, and African Development Bank, 2017). Thus, job creation is a pressing priority for African countries. Our findings suggest that investments in roads and electricity are mutually beneficial drivers of employment and structural transformation in Africa. However, the benefits of infrastructure investment could differ significantly across countries, between rural and urban areas, and across gender and age groups.

This paper adds to a growing body of research examining the impact of various sorts of infrastructure investments on development outcomes. Recent studies have shown that highways and railroads can have substantial impacts on the allocation of economic activity, land use, local economic specialization, and migration (Fajgelbaum and Redding, 2014; Cosar and Fajgelbaum, 2016; Dave Donaldson, 2016; Blankespoor et al., 2017; Berg et al., 2018; Donaldson, 2018; Morten and Oliveira, 2018; Fajgelbaum and Schaal, 2020; Jedwab and Storeygard, 2021). We use the same road panel as used by Berg et al. (2018) and Jedwab and Storeygard (2021). Berg et al. (2018) find a modest impact of improved market accessibility on local cropland expansion, but suggestive evidence of a positive association between improved market accessibility and local GDP growth which could reflect the stimulation of non-agricultural activities. Jedwab and Storeygard (2021) estimates show a positive 30-year elasticity of city population with respect to market access. These are average effects. The importance of heterogeneous effects have been examined by recent papers, examined in the survey of the literature by Berg et al. (2017), but most papers have looked at the spatial heterogeneous impacts. They find that transportation infrastructure increases the access of rural regions to cities, with the agglomeration effects of cities potentially causing productive capital and skilled labor to move from rural regions. Faber (2014) finds that NTHS highway connections in China have led to a reduction in local GDP growth and industrial output among peripheral counties on the way between targeted metropolitan centers relative to non-connected peripheral counties. A few papers have looked at the heterogeneous impacts across industries. Using historical U.S. data, Chandra and Thompson (2000) find that connections to highways have heterogeneous effects across industries. Ghani et al. (2016) find different impacts from the upgrades to India’s Golden Quadrilateral highway network on the organization and efficiency of manufacturing activity across districts, depending on their distance to the Golden Quadrilateral roads. Our paper contributes to this literature by looking at the heterogeneous impacts of roads on outcomes at the household level.

There is a lack of consensus on the benefits of electrification. While many studies find substantial benefits from electrification on income, labor supply and education outcomes (Dinkelman, 2011; Van de Walle et al., 2017; Zhang, 2018), others suggest that these benefits may be overstated (Burlig and Preonas, 2016; Aklin et al., 2017). However, a recent paper by Fried and Lagakos (2020) quantifies the long-run, general equilibrium effects of eliminating power outages on firm and aggregate productivity in Nigeria, for which they find much larger estimates than previously estimated in the literature. In line with this paper, our work analyzes the impacts of better access to the national grid for multiple African countries.

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