Exploring the correlation between sanitation standards and school performance in Brazil: a clustering analysis

Sanitation and education are two critical areas requiring immediate attention and improvement in Brazil. Students facing health issues have greater challenges in succeeding academically, as they may experience hospitalizations and difficulties concentrating due to illness. Although various factors can contribute to illness, this paper focuses on diseases resulting from inadequate sanitation conditions. The main objective of this research is to explore the correlation between sanitation standards and academic performance indices, considering sanitation, education, and health indices. In addition, the Brazilian states are clustered based on their indices. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was applied to measure the continuous variables’ statistical correlation. This research explores both positive and negative correlations. Clustering is an unsupervised machine learning method that groups data into clusters based on their similarities and patterns. The data collected in this study are sourced from prominent government databases, namely the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira (Inep), and the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS), covering the period from 2007 to 2020, and all Brazilian states. Results indicate a clear positive correlation between inadequate sanitation standards and higher hospitalization rates, or low sanitation rates and poorer school performance indices. This influences the students’ dispersion of age-grade and the non-attendance index, resulting in an adverse whirlpool effect on their academic performance. Thus, it is concluded that the initial hypothesis is confirmed, and that the government should raise its investments in sanitation to support the investments in education.