The Impact of Access to Water on Child Health in Senegal

This paper addresses the impact of access to water on child health in Senegal by using multinomial propensity score matching to estimate the impact of five water sources on the incidence of diarrhea in children. This information will facilitate a more informed cost‐benefit analysis when implementing water projects. Much research categorizes water sources into a binary variable: “improved” or “unimproved”. According to the findings of this paper, this is an erroneous restriction, as I find heterogeneous impacts of water sources on child health. In fact, water sources that are generally believed to be superior are not significantly different, and some are significantly less effective in decreasing incidence of diarrhea.