Water Hauling and Girls' School Attendance : Some New Evidence from Ghana
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,...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/05/17714533/water-hauling-girls-school-attendance-some-new-evidence-ghana http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15585 |
| Summary: | 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. |
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