The Geography of the Bottom Billion: Rural Isolation and Basic Service Access in the Republic of Mali

This article investigates the challenge of basic service access in one of the world’s poorest regions. Using the Republic of Mali as a case study, the article provides a new perspective on the dominant paradigm of decentralized service provision with a focus on rural areas, where basic services remain persistently inadequate. Service provision in regions such as West Africa will represent one of the most important development challenges in coming decades. This article applies a new geographical framework to decentralized institutions and service provision that is necessary to understand why access to basic services is becoming a more difficult problem to solve. It introduces two new analytical concepts—livelihood extensification and service attenuation—as well as a novel geographic dataset of rural service accessibility to show how rapid population growth and continued dependence on agriculture are putting basic services out of reach for an increasing share of Mali’s population.