Girls go for water and miss school

Water Hauling and Girls’ School Attendance: New Evidence From Ghana 

(Meninas que vão buscar água faltam mais à escola) 

MAY 26, 2011,  WASHINGTON, D.C.

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 DHS (Demographic and Health Surveys) from Ghana, in 1993-94, 1998-99, 2003 and 2008. Using GPS coordinates, we build an artificial panel of clusters, identifying the closest neighbours within each round. On this basis we estimate the relationship between girls’ school attendance and water hauling activity, correcting for potential endogeneity of communities and household characteristics. 

Our results indicate a strong negative relation between girls’ schooling, with a 15 minute reduction in water fetching times increasing girls’ school attendance by 8-12 percent. We also find indications of  “threshold” effects whereby such effects are far stronger for “high” ranges of water hauling time cost, than for “low” ranges. 

These results for Ghana seem to be the first definitive documentation of such a relationship for Africa. They serve to document some of the multiple and wide benefits to the population of increased tap water access, in African countries and beyond. 

Céline Nauges, Toulouse School of Economics -      Céline Nauges is a Senior Researcher at the French National Institute for Research in Agriculture (INRA) at the Toulouse School of Economics, in Toulouse, France. She is an internationally leading researcher, and has published widely, in several areas including water management in both high- and low-income countries; microeconometrics applied to agriculture, natural resources, and the environment; analysis of public policies for natural resources management; and techology adoption and decision making under uncertainty in the agricultural and industrial sectors.

Location: MC 6-598   Source:  http://water.worldbank.org/events/water-hauling-and-girls%E2%80%99-school-attendance-new-evidence-ghana