Agro-Food Processing and Territorial Attractiveness in Central Benin: Pathways Toward Sustainable Rural Economic Development

Agro-food processing activities are increasingly recognized as important levers of sustainable rural development, contributing to territorial attractiveness, local economic diversification, and more resilient rural livelihoods. However, despite growing recognition of their contribution to sustainable rural transformation, the territorial implications of agro-food processing remain insufficiently documented and quantified in Sub-Saharan Africa, a gap that is particularly pressing in the current context of Benin’s ongoing decentralization reforms, which increasingly call for territorially grounded evidence to inform local development policy. This study addresses this gap by assessing the contribution of agro-food processing to territorial attractiveness in central Benin, as a pathway toward more sustainable and spatially balanced local economic development. Data were collected from 204 individual and cooperative processing units surveyed via KoboCollect (version 2025.3.3) using snowball sampling. As the data are cross-sectional, the reported associations should be interpreted as descriptive rather than causal. A Territorial Attractiveness Index (TAI), combining indicators of investment, business creation, and agglomeration effects, was developed as a quantitative tool to measure and monitor this contribution. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and, following verification of ANOVA assumptions, the non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis test with Bonferroni-adjusted pairwise comparisons. The results show that 74% of surveyed units made investments (mean CFAF 248,919.5), 76% reported an association with local business creation, and 90.7% reported agglomeration effects linked to economic concentration. The mean TAI was 4.559 out of 7, indicating a substantial association with territorial attractiveness. Significant differences were observed among municipalities (Kruskal–Wallis χ2 = 43.27, df = 5, p < 0.001), with Bantè exhibiting markedly lower attractiveness than the other five municipalities, which did not differ among themselves, a pattern that appears more closely linked to structural deficits in collective coordination than to a general absence of processing activity. These findings suggest that sustainable rural development policies should promote context-specific, territorially anchored agro-industrial clusters to reduce spatial disparities and strengthen the long-term economic sustainability of rural territories.