Access to Water, Women’s Work and Child Outcomes

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 surveys is
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.