ArticleJournal of development economics2022
The dirty business of eliminating open defecation: The effect of village sanitation on child height from field experiments in four countries.
Article in Journal of development economics, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The role of nutrition-sensitive interventions in improving nutritional outcomes: findings from a systematic review and meta-analysis.International journal for equity in health · 2025Pooled it
- Behavioral Adaptation to Improved Environmental Quality: Evidence From a Sanitation Intervention.Health economics · 2025Trial
- Sanitation marketing in Nigeria.World development · 2025Article
- Effective community mobilization: Evidence from Mali.World development · 2025Article
- To use financial incentives or not? Insights from experiments in encouraging sanitation investments in four countries.World development · 2025Article
- Evidence on designing sanitation interventions.Journal of development economics · 2024Article
- Deworming and micronutrient status by community open defecation prevalence: An observational study using nationally representative data from India, 2016-2018.PLoS medicine · 2024Observational
- Early warning systems, mobile technology, and cholera aversion: Evidence from rural Bangladesh.Journal of environmental economics and management · 2024Article
- Privatization of public goods: Evidence from the sanitation sector in Senegal.Journal of development economics · 2023Article
- Exposure to open defecation can account for the Indian enigma of child height.Journal of development economics · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We examine the impacts of a sanitation program designed to eliminate open defecation in at-scale randomized field experiments in four countries: India, Indonesia, Mali, and Tanzania. The programs - all variants of the widely-used Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach - increase village private sanitation coverage in all four locations by 7-39 percentage points. We use the experimentally-induced variation in access to sanitation to identify the causal relationship between village sanitation coverage and child height. We find evidence of threshold effects where increases in child health of 0.3 standard deviations are realized once village sanitation coverage reaches 50-75%. There do not appear to be further gains beyond this threshold. These results suggest that there are large health benefits to achieving coverage levels well below the 100% coverage pushed by the CLTS movement. Open defecation decreased in all countries through improved access to private sanitation facilities, and additionally through increased use of sanitation facilities in Mali who implemented the most intensive behavior change intervention.
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