Access to Water, Women’s Work, and Child Outcomes

By Gayatri Koolwal, Dominique van de Walle. Economic development and cultural change, 2010

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Poor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water. Do women living in places where more time is needed for water collection tend to participate less in income-earning market-based activities? Do the education outcomes of their children tend to be worse? We use micro data for nine developing countries to help address these questions. Our primary aim is to describe the patterns in the data rather than to infer causality, although we do treat the household-level access to water as endogenous, assuming that community-level access is exogenous conditional on a wide range of geographic factors. Better access to water is not found to be associated with greater off-farm paid work but is associated with less unpaid work for women. In countries where substantial gender gaps in schooling exist, both boys’ and girls’ enrollments also tend to be better.

Subfields: Nutrition and Dietetics, Pollution, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fd6d99827b791ce4ff98e4748eefa295b8c8703

Citations in the corpus

• What Explains Uneven Female Labor Force Participation Levels and Trends in Developing Countries? (2019, unknown): “In contrast, Koolwal and van de Walle (2013) find no impact of enhanced water access on female employment in nine countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and North Africa.”