Sanitation

In this paper, I study the effect of unfinished sewerage infrastructure on early-life mortality in Peru. I compile several sources of administrative panel data for 1,400 districts spanning 2005–2015, and I rely on the budgetary plans and timing of expenditure for 6,000 projects to measure unfinished projects and those completed in a given district.

This paper provides new evidence on the recent performance of piped water consumption subsidies in terms of pro-poor targeting for 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world. Our results suggest that in these countries, existing tariff structures fall well short of recovering the costs of service provision, and that, moreover, the resulting subsidies largely fail to achieve the goal of improving the accessibility and affordability of piped water among the poor.

Making lumpy human capital investments is difficult, particularly since returns may accrue with a significant time lag.

This paper provides new evidence on how effectively piped water consumption subsidies are targeting poor households in 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world.

This paper estimates flexible child health production functions to investigate whether better water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices make nutrition intake more productive for children aged 6-24 months.

In November 2018, Nigeria declared that its water supply, sanitation and hygiene sector was in crisis. This was partly prompted by the fact that the country has struggled to make progress towards ending open defecation. Almost one in four Nigerians – around 50 million people – defecates in open areas.

Credit constraints are considered to be an important barrier hindering adoption of preventive health investments among low-income households in developing countries. We find labelling loans is a viable strategy to improve uptake of lumpy preventive health investments.

We study the effectiveness of a community-level information and mobilization intervention to reduce open defecation (OD) and increase sanitation investments in Nigeria. The results of a cluster-randomized control trial in 246 communities, conducted between 2014 and 2018, suggest that average impacts are exiguous.

Our study contributes to the understanding of key drivers of stunted growth, a factor widely recognized as major impediment to human capital development.

In this report, we focus on understanding the context for the Sanitation Marketing (SanMark) intervention and potential initial impacts, after its gradual development and roll-out to selected treatment areas in the Nigerian states of Ekiti and Enugu.

Many low-income countries face the hefty challenge of increasing sanitation coverage, in both rural and urban areas, which demand different solutions. In response, governments, with support from international agencies, bilateral donors and non-government organisations, are deploying a range of programmes and policies to accelerate progress towards the new global goals. Community-led total sanitation (CLTS) is one popular approach. CLTS works with an entire community to identify the negative effects of poor sanitation, especially the practice of open defecation, and empowers them to collectively find solutions. CLTS is understood to be more suitable for small, rural and homogeneous communities, however it is still considered an appropriate solution for more urbanised areas. In this brief, we provide quantitative evidence to support this conjecture and bring forward a simple rule of thumb that allows more efficient programme targeting. We suggest that using this information can improve the targeting of CLTS in Nigeria, and possibly other countries, freeing up scarce resources to identify and test complementary sanitation approaches suitable for more urbanised communities.

This report, written in collaboration with Indepth Precision Consulting, Nigeria, presents a detailed description of the baseline data collected as part of the Formal Research Component of WaterAid UK's Project “Sustainable Total Sanitation Nigeria -implementation, learning, research, and influence on practice and policy" (STS Nigeria), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The authors use primary data collected in both rural and urban contexts in two states of India to understand determinants of toilet ownership and acquisition and subsequently to analyse the acquisition of toilets in the context of an intervention that alleviated one of the major constraints to acquisition - financial resources.

The authors study a Conditional Cash Transfer programme in which the cash transfers to the mother only depend on the fulfillment of the national preventive visit schedule by her children born before she registered in the programme.