Person:
Banerjee, Sudeshna
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Infrastructure economics; energy access; monitoring and evaluation
Degrees
ORCID
Departments
Energy Unit, Sustainable Energy Department, World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Sudeshna Banerjee is a Senior Economist in the Sustainable Energy Department of the World Bank. She has worked on energy and infrastructure issues in the South Asia and Africa departments in both operations and analytic assignments. She focuses on project economics, monitoring and evaluation, and on a broad range of energy sector issues including energy access, energy subsidies, renewable energy, and sector assessments. Ms. Banerjee holds a Ph.D in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and M.A. and B.A. degrees in Economics from Delhi University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
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Publication
Access, Affordability, and Alternatives : Modern Infrastructure Services in Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-02)Africa lags well behind other developing regions in infrastructure access. The limited gains of the 1990s have not increased much in the 2000s. There is clear evidence that many countries are failing to expand services fast enough to keep ahead of rapid demographic growth and even faster urbanization. As a result, if present trends continue, Africa is likely to lag even further behind other developing regions, and universal access will be more than 50 years away in many countries. However, there is variation in performance across countries, even within the low and middle income brackets. A significant number of countries have succeeded in increasing the number of people who have access to water, electricity, and sanitation, by an annual average of 5-10 percent. Further investigation is warranted to explain what determines the superior performance of these countries. -
Publication
Measuring Trends in Access to Modern Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa : Results from Demographic and Health Surveys
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-10)A recent study for sub-Saharan Africa by Banerjee et al. (2007) uses Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 22 countries that have conducted at least two such surveys between 1990 and 2005 in order to collect comparable information across countries on access to modern and alternative infrastructure services over time. In addition to national, urban, and rural trends in access, the study includes a distributional analysis of how access rates have evolved since 1990. That is, households are divided into five quintiles of population according to their level of wealth, with wealth defined using a principal components analysis. The objective of this note is to provide a summary of key findings from the study regarding access trends to electricity, piped water, flush toilets, and landline telephones over the period 1990-2005. -
Publication
Trends in Household Coverage of Modern Infrastructure Services in Africa
( 2009-03-01)Household surveys have long been used to estimate poverty and inequality trends, as well as trends in education and health indicators, but they have not been used to the same extent to assess trends in the access to or coverage of modern infrastructure services. In this paper, we use Demographic and Health Surveys from a larger sample of sub-Saharan African countries in order to collect comparable information across countries on coverage of piped water, flush toilets, electricity, and landline telephones over time. The results suggest that coverage rates for electricity, flush toilets have improved slightly over the last decade. Coverage of piped water has declined, at the same time as coverage of landline (as well as cellular) telephone has increased rapidly. The decline has been primarily in the urban areas while the infrastructure coverage has either increased or remained stable in rural Africa. For all four services, among the poorest households coverage remains virtually inexistent. If business as usual continues, it would take a very long time to reach universal or widely shared coverage even in countries where coverage has improved. These results point to the need to increase efforts by governments and international community to progressively increase access to modern infrastructure services in Africa.