Ben Arimah

UN Habitat · Global Reports and Trends Unit

Improved infrastructure can deliver major benefits capable of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Despite the importance of infrastructure in the functioning of African cities, there are few attempts at investigating its contribution from a city perspective. Thi...

Drawing on project experiences over a thirty-year period and academic literature, this paper focuses on the question: what has worked in slum upgrading in Africa? We find that efforts to regularize land titles to confer de jure security of tenure have not been encouraging. By contrast, infrastructure investment efforts have performed better—they ha...

There exists a dearth of empirical studies on what determines infrastructure spending in cities of developing countries. This in part can be attributed to the absence of quality data and the tendency for researchers to gloss over variations in infrastructure expenditure in or across developing world cities in the general belief that investment in i...

Incl. abstract, bib. This paper uses cross-national data to investigate the extent to which the adoption of human development strategies has resulted in a reduction of poverty in Africa. Inter-country variations in income and human poverty reinforce the established patterns of well-being within the continent, as countries in Northern and Southern A...

There are few studies that investigate the provision of infrastructure in Africa from a cross-city perspective. This can be attributed to the dearth of reliable data. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) through its Global Urban Indicators Programme recently completed the collection of an extensive set of urban indicators for...

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the nature of the informal sector's linkages with the formal sector in Nigeria. The informal sector has both backward and forward linkages with the formal sector. The backward linkages involve the flow of raw materials, equipment, finance and consumer goods from the formal sector to informal sector ent...

This paper measures and accounts for variations in housing-sector performance using the UNCHS and World Bank's Housing Indicators database of a diverse sample of 52 cities. The first stage of the empirical analysis, based on a principal components analysis, indicates that housing-sector performance can be evaluated in terms of six distinct dimensio...

This paper investigates the extent to which private residential development complies with urban development and planning regulations in the city of Ibadan, Nigeria. Findings indicate that while the average household is aware of the existence of planning regulations, this does not necessarily translate into compliance with these regulations. Further...

Energy transition is the process whereby there is an increase in the volume and proportion of commercial energy, to the extent that it replaces traditional fuels as the main source of energy and having enormous implications for the physical and biotic environment. This energy-environment process has rarely been the focus of research investigation i...

Comparative analysis of the functioning of the housing sector has been severely limited by the dearth of reliable data. In seeking to rectify this, the UNCHS and World Bank have provided data on 52 cities through their joint Housing Indicators Program. Drawing on this data set, this paper identifies the housing policy outcomes that are particularly...

This paper estimates housing tenure choice models for the Ibadan housing market in Nigeria. The empirical analysis based on a logit regression model reveals that the key determi- i-nants of the probability of home-ownership are: income, the investment motive for home-ownership, number of children in the house, gender of the head of household, stage...

Attempts at redressing the problem of rapid deterioration of the urban environment in developing countries have not produced the desired results. This is because such attempts have been mainlyad hocand have not taken into consideration willingness to pay for improvements in the quality of the urban environment. Consequently, in implementing environ...

Very little is known about the behaviour of housing demand in sub-Saharan housing markets. This ostensibly is due to the dearth of such studies in this region. In this paper the author estimates the parameters of the demand for housing, using data drawn from the city of Ibadan in Nigeria. The empirical analysis, in which housing is viewed as a comp...

This paper establishes and measures the impact of some factors explaining residential water consumption using data drawn from Calabar in Nigeria. The results of our empirical analysis reveal that the key factors affecting domestic water consumption are: household size, income, number of taps in the housing unit, regularity in the flow of pipe-borne...

This paper presents estimates of the demand for a set of housing attributes using data drawn from the renter and owner occupier housing submarkets for Ibadan, Nigeria. The empirical analysis, based on an adaptation of Rosen's two-step model, reveals that the most important determinants of the demand for housing attributes are income, price of the a...

Estimates the demand functions for a set of housing attributes for the city of Ibadan, Nigeria, using Rosen's two-step estimation procedure. The empirical results reveal that the most important determinants of the demand for housing attributes are: income, price of the attribute in question, household size and the occupational status of the head of...

In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyse the spatial variation in housing values for the renter and owner-occupier housing submarkets for the city of Ibadan. The findings clearly reveal that income is as the most important determinant of intra-urban house price variations for both forms of tenure. Of importance to policy makers is the fac...

This paper undertakes an analysis of intra-urban variations in homeownership rates, using data drawn from the metropolitan area of Ibadan, Nigeria. The spatial pattern depicted revealed that homeownership rates roughly coincide with the pattern of the city's historical development. Furthermore, the empirical analysis based on a multiple regression...

One of the most visible and enduring manifestations of urban poverty in developing countries is the formation and proliferation of slums. While attention has focused on the rapid pace of urbanization as the sole or major factor explaining the proliferation of slums and squatter settlements in developing countries, there are other factors whose impa...