Leonard Wantchekon Researches the Roots of Success in Africa and Beyond

Leonard Wantchekon grew up in a family of farmers in rural Benin but was lucky enough to get an education at the first missionary school in West Africa. While there, he recalls observing the differences in fortunes between himself and his peers. As a young adult in college, he helped organize prodemocracy protests and was imprisoned. He made a daring escape before going into exile in Canada and the U.S. in the late 1980s. All those experiences influenced his scholarship in international economics, as he became a professor at Yale and NYU before joining Princeton’s faculty in 2011. “In my work, I’m always interested in how to develop alternatives to the status quo,” he says. His research includes looking at the roots of individual success and national prosperity in Africa and around the world.

Quick Facts

Title
Professor of Politics and International Affairs

Time at Princeton
14 years

Recent Class
State Capture and Misgovernance

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Mikel Casal

Wantchekon’s Research: A Sampling

Building African Economies

After supporting African students in the U.S. for many years, Wantchekon conceived of a uniquely African institution that would educate the best and brightest of the continent. With support from Princeton in 2014, he established the African School of Economics, a pan-African university in Benin that has since expanded to multiple campuses and sent dozens of students to postdoc roles or teaching positions at top-ranked institutions in the U.S. and Europe. He’s now opening a new campus in Zanzibar, a cosmopolitan island strategically located between Africa, India, and the Gulf States, which he envisions not just as an educational institution but also as an innovation hub around artificial intelligence and other technologies. “Our goal will be to set up business ecosystems within the university to use research to create economic opportunities,” he says, “not just by doing research, but also by creating innovation-driven startups.”

Unappreciated Aspiration

Much of Wantchekon’s research has been focused on understanding the drivers of social mobility, compiling unique datasets of individuals in Benin, Nigeria, New Orleans, and other areas to examine the relative impact of education, income, and other factors. “We collect data documenting not only the individual but also their fathers, grandfathers, siblings, and neighbors,” he says. Among his most compelling findings is that education can pull people out of poverty — but just as important are social connections with educated and Leonard Wantchekonsuccessful people, which can spur a person’s own desire to succeed. “One of the most unappreciated drivers of mobility is aspiration,” Wantchekon says, touting the importance of mixing low-income and uneducated individuals with rich and educated counterparts to raise society. “This could be one of the strengths of African culture, which is based on social cohesion, trust, and connection.”

Gene-Editing Politics

On a broader level, Wantchekon has applied his analytical lens to politics to better understand why governments fail and what can be done to improve them. “It’s like genetic editing,” he says, “where you take out or add something to the problem, and then experiment with it to see what changes.” In identifying issues that cause institutional failure, he takes a deep historical perspective; one of his most acclaimed papers, for example, showed that trust in government and society is lower today among certain ethnic groups in areas of Africa historically impacted by the slave trade. In experimenting to improve government, he’s staged interventions such as adding more deliberation into municipal governments in Africa, inspired by New England town meetings from the 18th century, and found this increases cooperation and transparency, and reduces corruption.