Promoting Education Through School Sanitation

This article originally appeared on WorldBank.org.

Worldwide, one in five children of upper-primary-school age remain out of school. Girls in developing countries are disproportionately affected, with a quarter of them not completing primary school. In dealing with issues of gender inequality, some academics and policymakers have focused on the issue of menstruation as a reason why policymakers should (or should not) invest in sanitation-related interventions in schools (e.g., Birdthistle et al. 2011, Oster and Thornton 2011, Grant et al. 2013). However, an overly narrow focus on a girl’s few menstrual days may obscure the larger, every-day issues of health, privacy, and safety facing both girls and boys.

In my paper (“Sanitation and Education”), I use a change in national Indian policy to examine how improving the health, privacy, and safety of the school environment through sanitation influences the educational decisions of children across different ages. Specifically, I evaluate the educational impact of a large school-latrine-construction initiative using new annual administrative data on approximately 140 thousand Indian schools. To try to understand the mechanisms behind any impacts, I explore differential impacts by student sex and age.

The program In 2003, the Government of India took on the issue of eradicating open defecation by providing substantial financial resources for schools to provide sanitation facilities. This initiative, called the School Sanitation and Hygiene Education program (SSHE), was bolstered by the Millennium Development Goals, in which it was suggested that school sanitation could help address several of their goals, including increasing school participation, promoting gender equality in education, combating disease, and ensuring environmental sustainability. Latrine construction was the main component of SSHE, which also included some hygiene education and small-scale investments (such as providing a bucket for water). The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation generally managed the program, so there was no explicit tradeoff in other educational inputs. Due to resource constraints, the program was rolled out gradually over time.

A primary empirical challenge in estimating a link between sanitation and education is that schools with latrines may differ systematically from school without latrines. To overcome potential selection bias in the cross-section, I compare schools that receive latrines in 2003 to similar schools in the same district that do not receive latrines in 2003 using a differences-in-differences empirical strategy. ...

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