Access to water, women's work and child outcomes

Gayatri Koolwal and Dominique van de Walle

No 5302, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Poor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water. How then do they respond to improved access to water infrastructure? Does it increase their participation in income earning market-based activities? Does it improve the health and education outcomes of their children? To help address these questions, a new approach for dealing with the endogeneity of infrastructure placement in cross-sectional surveysis proposed and implemented using data for nine developing countries. The paper does not find that access to water comes with greater off-farm work for women, although in countries where substantial gender gaps in schooling exist, both boys'and girls'enrollments improve with better access to water. There are also some signs of impacts on child health as measured by anthropometric z-scores.

Keywords: Gender; Water Supply and Sanitation; Rural Labor Markets; Rural Water Supply and Sanitation; Access&Equity in Basic Education; Early Child and Children's Health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSC ... ered/PDF/WPS5302.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Access to Water, Women's Work, and Child Outcomes (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5302

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().