Operational since March 2024, Africa’s longest crude oil pipeline, the Niger-Benin Export Pipeline (NBEP), connects the oil fields of Agadem in eastern Niger to the port of Sèmè-Kpodji in southern Benin (Figure 1).

This 1,950 km long pipeline was built through a partnership between the governments of Niger and Benin and the China National Oil and Gas Exploration and Development Company Ltd (CNODC), a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Corporation, which finances the project and manages its operations. 

The NBEP is a major foreign investment with high economic and strategic stakes in a region marked by increased political turmoil and insecurity. After Niger’s 2023 coup d’état, relations between Benin and Niger deteriorated, leading to disruptions in pipeline construction and oil exports. In 2024 various armed groups started to attack pipeline infrastructure and security forces, particularly in areas with increased jihadist activity, including the Niger-Benin border area.  

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Despite this increasingly challenging context, the project’s stakes are too high to be abandoned as, like other large-scale infrastructure investments, the NBEP promises to bring significant benefits to both its investors and its host countries. There, the NBEP project is expected to bring socioeconomic development on both national and local levels, through tax revenue, job creation, employment, and local infrastructure development.  

In Benin, the construction and operation of a 687km long buried pipeline, a pumping and a maintenance station and a marine terminal station, envisaged the recruitment of over 3,000 people, including 350 to 500 in permanent jobs. Beninese legislation governing the NBEP sets out clear local content requirements, including the priority recruitment of local workers and quota for Beninese nationals across different roles and positions, and expectations of local development through vocational trainings and corporate infrastructure investment in communities affected by the project. 

As such, the NBEP project clearly has the potential to boost socio-economic development in Benin. Yet, experiences across the continent show that large oil infrastructure can also bring long-lasting harm when they fail to adequately prevent, mitigate and remediate their negative impacts on local communities and the environment, while also falling short on local development promises.   

In Benin, the development of the NBEP is estimated to directly affect 602,148 people who live mainly in rural communities, with predominantly agriculture-based, informal economies and high poverty rates. To enable the construction of the pipeline, land was expropriated, an approach commonly used by governments to enable public-interest projects, but one that is often contentious due to risks of inadequate compensation, weak consultation, livelihood disruption, and longer-term social consequences. 

To better gauge the NBEP’s role in driving local development, and its potential for alleviating and/or amplifying local grievances and conflict, this paper assesses the socio-economic, environmental and security impacts of the NBEP as lived and perceived by affected persons and communities in northern Benin. It focuses on three processes that each have the potential to significantly impact affected communities and their experience of the NBEP project: (1) compulsory land acquisition, (2) local benefit creation, and (3) stakeholder engagement. 

This research by IPIS and Laboratoire Société-Environnement (LaSEn) draws on 205 semi-structured surveys conducted across eight affected villages in Borgou department, covering the districts of Bembèrèkè, N’Dali, Parakou, and Tchaourou. Borgou is Benin’s second most populous region and the most heavily affected by the NBEP project. It is also a a predominantly rural region dominated by agriculture, where land is central to livelihoods and where land tenure insecurity and disputes are common, making land-related issues a critical risk factor in the NBEP’s implementation. 

By analysing local experiences and perceptions, the authors provide grassroots insights into the lived local impacts of large-scale extractive infrastructure projects, with broadly applicable learnings to ensure these projects realise sustainable local development ambitions that are respective of rightsholders rights. 

This publication has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The contents of this document can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.