Publication: Water Hauling and Girls' School Attendance : Some New Evidence from Ghana
Date
2013-05
ISSN
Published
2013-05
Author(s)
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. This paper studies how such costs affect
girls' schooling in Ghana, with an analysis based on
four rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys. Using
Global Positioning System coordinates, it builds an
artificial panel of clusters, identifying the closest
neighbors within each round. The results indicate a
significant negative relation between girls' school
attendance and water hauling activity, as a halving of water
fetching time increases girls' school attendance by 2.4
percentage points on average, with stronger impacts in rural
communities. The results seem to be the first definitive
documentation of such a relationship in Africa. They
document some of the multiple and wide population benefits
of increased tap water access, in Africa and elsewhere.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Nauges, Celine; Strand, Jon. 2013. Water Hauling and Girls' School Attendance : Some New Evidence from Ghana. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 6443. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15585 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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