Evaluating Water- and Health-related Development Projects: A Cross-project and Micro-based Approach

We present a micro-based approach to evaluate the effect of water- and health-related development projects which complements established evaluation methods. We collect information from 1.8 million individuals from DHS clusters (Demographic and Health Surveys) in 38 developing economies between 1986 and 2017. We combine cluster information with over 14,000 sub-national projects from the World Bank. We then investigate the impact of the projects employing fixed effects estimation techniques. Our findings indicate that the time to gather water and child mortality tend to decrease when projects are realised. The quality of drinking water and sanitation facilities are also positively affected by projects. Our data allow us to account for cluster heterogeneity, which is an important extension to the cross-country literature. Various robustness checks support our findings.

Automated summary

This study introduces a new micro-based approach to evaluate the impact of water- and health-related development projects, finding positive effects on water collection time, child mortality, and the quality of drinking water and sanitation facilities. Robustness checks on the data support the research findings.