The Effect of Water Hauling Time on Children’s School Enrollment in Haiti

Beatriz Couto Ribeiro, Adriana Castillo and María Pérez Urdiales

No 14591, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: Limited access to safe and proximate water remains a defining constraint in Haiti, where access to piped water remains limited and school enrollment is not universal. Using a pseudo-panel constructed from four rounds of the Haiti Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), we estimate the causal impact of water hauling time on childrens school enrollment. Our findings reveal a strong and statistically significant, each additional minute spent fetching water reduces the likelihood of enrollment by about 1.3 percentage points,with substantially larger effects in rural areas where hauling time is highest. Gender-specific estimates reveal that the burden of distance is not symmetric. While girls more often perform water collection overall, boys disproportionately undertake long-distance trips, and simulated enrollment probabilities indicate a widening gender gap once collection times exceed 3040 minutes, with boys experiencing steeper enrollment losses. These findings demonstrate how deficient water infrastructure depresses educational participation, underscoring the potential of investments in improved and more proximate water access to generate meaningful school enrollment gains.

Keywords: water; Haiti; children; school enrollment; Education; demographic and health surveys (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C36 H31 I24 Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-edu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... ollment-in-Haiti.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:idb:brikps:14591

DOI: 10.18235/0014035

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().