Waterborne diseases and children's learning

About this event

Unsafe water kills 1.2 million people every year, yet there is little research on the environmental and social risk factors of waterborne disease incidence and the consequences for children’s learning. Building on recent advances in hydrological engineering, we construct a hydrological model for Tanzania that simulates the appearance of stagnant water pools – essential to the growth and spread of waterborne pathogens – which we use as a measure of waterborne disease potential. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that test scores are reduced by 0.07 standard deviations for every 10pp increase in the area covered by stagnant water, and diarrhoea prevalence increases by 33%. These results mask important heterogeneities: We find that the most vulnerable children are those who live in urban areas with poor sanitation. Access to safe sanitation attenuates the negative effect of waterborne disease potential on both children’s health and learning, which suggests that policy-makers should incorporate local environmental risk factors when implementing sanitation policies in regions vulnerable to waterborne disease.