Abstract
In large parts of the world, a lack of home tap water burdens households as the water must be brought to the house from outside, at great expense in terms of effort and time. We here study how such costs affect girls’ schooling in Ghana, with an analysis based on four rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys. We address potential endogeneity issues by building an artificial panel of clusters using GPS coordinates. Our results indicate a significant negative relation between girls’ school attendance and water hauling activity, as a halving of water fetching times increases girls’ school attendance by about 7 percentage points on average, with stronger impacts in rural communities. Our results seem to be the first definitive documentation of such a relationship in Sub-Saharan Africa. They document some of the multiple and wide population benefits of increased tap water access, that are likely to be relevant in many African countries, and elsewhere.
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20 November 2017
After publication of this article (Nauges and Strand, 2017) we have agreed that the name of Jon Strand should be removed because his contribution to the article was regarded by him as insufficient to warrant a listing as a co-author.
Notes
In such situations, the quantity of water collected is often below 5 liters per capita per day (l/c/d) which implies that consumption requirements are likely not to be fulfilled and hygiene is not possible (unless it is practiced at the source), Howard and Bartram (2003).
The authors found that time saved due to less need to fetch water was mostly spent on leisure and social activities.
The average GNI per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa was USD 1410 in 2011. These figures were obtained from the document Ghana at a glance published by the World Bank in 2013 and available at http://devdata.worldbank.org/AAG/gha_aag.pdf; accessed 26 January 2015.
“Access to an improved water source” refers to the percentage of the population with reasonable access to water from an improved source such as a household connection, public standpipe, borehole, protected well or spring, and rainwater collection. Unimproved sources include vendors, tanker trucks, and unprotected wells and springs. “Reasonable access is defined as the availability of at least 20 liters per person per day from a source within one kilometer of the dwelling”; see http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.H2O.SAFE.ZS; accessed 26 January 2015.
For greater details on the sampling procedure in each of the four rounds, see the Ghana DHS final reports available at http://www.measuredhs.com/.
The great circle distance is the shortest distance between any two points on the surface of a sphere.
The percentage of households having access to water in residence or in the yard can only be calculated for the first three rounds of the survey. In 2008 the list of sources does not distinguish between wells in residence and well outside the residence. The figure shown in the table (21 %) corresponds to the proportion of households reporting a time spent to haul water equal to 0 min.
See http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/af/119004.htm; accessed 26 January 2015.
The Bernoulli log-likelihood function is given by \(l_i \left( b \right) \equiv y_i \log \left[ {G(\mathbf{x}_{i} \mathbf{b})} \right] +\left( {1-y_i } \right) \log \left[ {1-G(\mathbf{x}_{i} \mathbf{b})} \right] \) for \(0<G\left( . \right) <1\); see Papke and Wooldridge (1996).
This model can be estimated using the glm command in Stata and the cluster option can be used to obtain standard errors robust to any form of serial correlation.
The wealth index is provided in the DHS surveys. It is calculated using principal components analysis based on data concerning the household’s ownership of a number of consumer items such as a television and car; dwelling characteristics such as flooring material; type of drinking water source; toilet facilities; and other characteristics that are related to wealth status. The resulting asset scores are standardized in relation to a standard normal distribution with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. These standardized scores are then used to create the break points that define wealth quintiles as: Lowest, Second, Middle, Fourth, and Highest, see http://www.measuredhs.com/.
The sex ratio at birth in Ghana is 1.03 males for each female, which is similar to the sex ratio in Western countries such as the UK (1.05), the US (1.05) or Australia (1.06), and lower than the sex ratio in countries that are known to practice sex discrimination such as China (1.11 ) and India (1.12); source: CIA World Factbook, available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2018.html (accessed 26 January 2015). On our sample, the sex ratio was 1.036 boys (aged between 5 and 15 years old) for one girl in 2008, which is in the range of the sex ratio at birth reported in the CIA World Factbook.
The estimation results of the first-stage regressions are not shown here but are available upon request.
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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-017-0194-8.
Appendices
Appendix 1: Map of Ghana (Source: DHS Report on Ghana, 2008)
Appendix 2: Time to Haul Water and School Attendance, by Source of Drinking Water
Appendix 3: Time to Haul Water and School Attendance, by Region
Appendix 4: Robustness of the Cluster Matching Procedure
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Nauges, C., Strand, J. Water Hauling and Girls’ School Attendance: Some New Evidence from Ghana. Environ Resource Econ 66, 65–88 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-015-9938-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-015-9938-5