Impact of access to water and sanitation services on educational attainment

Without proper water and sanitation services, children are prone to the contagion of waterborne diseases. When not sick, children and their caregivers have to allocate their leisure time in order to meet their water and sanitation needs. It is through these health and leisure time use changes that access to water and sanitation services impacts the educational attainment of children. To explore the impacts, this paper proposes a household utility maximization model in which access and sanitation services are determinants of the child's health. In turn, education depends on the health status of the child. Comparative statistics indicate that households consider the health gains to the market value of their leisure time, and the changes in the consumption of other goods. In order to sort out the endogeneity between provision of access to water and sanitation services, and educational attainment, this paper uses an instrumental approach based on the technical features of the water systems and, as a novelty, the number of rivers within the municipality territory. Estimates suggest that access to water and sanitation services has a positive and significant effect on schooling, when measured by the completed number of school years. These positive effects call for the expansion of the laggard sewerage systems in the country, both at home and at school, by using different technologies