Working Paper: NBER ID: w29447
Authors: Johannes Haushofer; Michael Kremer; Ricardo Maertens; Brandon Joel Tan
Abstract: Each year, around 500,000 children under 5 die from diarrhea, making it the third-leading cause of death in this age group. More than 80 percent of these deaths are attributable to unsafe drinking water. Drinking water can be made safe through dilute chlorine solution, but take-up of this technology has been low. Previous work has shown that free community-wide provision of dilute chlorine solution through “dispensers” – reservoirs of chlorine solution at water sources that make chlorination easy and free – increases take-up of chlorination. However, it has remained unclear whether this increase also translates into reduced mortality. Here we show that four years of community-wide provision of dilute chlorine solution in rural Kenya reduces all-cause under-5 mortality by 1.4 percentage points (95% CI: 0.3 pp, 2.5 pp), a 63% reduction relative to control. We estimate that at USD 25 per DALY averted, free provision of chlorine solution is twenty times more cost-effective than the WHO “highly cost-effective” threshold.
Keywords: Chlorination; Child Mortality; Water Treatment; Kenya
JEL Codes: I15; O1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| chlorine provision in control villages (Q25) | access to chlorine in shops (L65) |
| treatment effects concentrated in certain districts (C21) | variability in treatment effects (C21) |
| community-wide provision of dilute chlorine solution (Q25) | under-5 mortality (I15) |
| community-wide provision of dilute chlorine solution (Q25) | child mortality rates (J13) |
| community-wide provision of dilute chlorine solution (Q25) | under-2 mortality (J13) |