Working Paper 312 - Quality Homes for Sustainable Malaria Prevention in Africa

Tiguéné Nabassaga, El-hadj Bah and Issa Faye ()
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Issa Faye: African Development Bank, Postal: 15 Avenue du Ghana P.O.Box 323-1002 Tunis-Belvedère, Tunisia, https://www.afdb.org/en/knowledge/publications

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Abstract: Using the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from 8 African countries, among the top 10 countries with the highest malaria cases, accounting for 87% of malaria incidence cases in Africa, we analyze the impact of housing quality and the usual malaria prevention measures on malaria incidence among children under 5 years old. First, we investigate the potential correlation between malaria incidence and the quality of housing materials. Secondly, using OLS, two-stage least squares and Poisson regression, we estimate the marginal effects of housing quality on the incidence of malaria. The results can be summarized in four points. (i) The statistical analysis results show a substantial correlation between housing quality and the incidence of malaria. We found 8 percentage points lower rate of incidence among children living in houses constructed with improved materials than those in houses with poor quality materials. (ii) We also found that it is not only the physical characteristic of homes that matters, having good sanitation is associate with lower malaria incidence, with a total difference of 10 and 4 percentage points compared to those with less improved toilet facility and poor-quality drinking water respectively. (iii) An improvement in the overall housing quality leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of malaria among children under 5 years old. Explicitly, an improvement from the first percentile measure of housing quality to the 50th percentile leads to a 32% reduction in the number of malaria cases among children under age-five. In other words, if one improves the housing quality of poorer households to the national average, and keeping other factors constant, the number of malaria cases will drop by 50%. (iv) For both groups of households, those that use mosquito bed nets and those who use insecticide as means of preventing malaria, the results show that improved housing quality complements bed nets and insecticides. As housing quality improves, the role of the two preventives become smaller and smaller.

Keywords: Malaria, Housing quality, indoor intervention, IV regression, marginal plot. JEL classification: I18; P25; B23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-02-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-env and nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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