| 1. |
- Scaini, Anna, et al.
(författare)
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Pathways from research to sustainable development: Insights from ten research projects in sustainability and resilience
- 2024
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Ingår i: AMBIO. - : SPRINGER. - 0044-7447 .- 1654-7209.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Drawing on collective experience from ten collaborative research projects focused on the Global South, we identify three major challenges that impede the translation of research on sustainability and resilience into better-informed choices by individuals and policy-makers that in turn can support transformation to a sustainable future. The three challenges comprise: (i) converting knowledge produced during research projects into successful knowledge application; (ii) scaling up knowledge in time when research projects are short-term and potential impacts are long-term; and (iii) scaling up knowledge across space, from local research sites to larger-scale or even global impact. Some potential pathways for funding agencies to overcome these challenges include providing targeted prolonged funding for dissemination and outreach, and facilitating collaboration and coordination across different sites, research teams, and partner organizations. By systematically documenting these challenges, we hope to pave the way for further innovations in the research cycle.
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| 2. |
- Allakulov, Umrbek, et al.
(författare)
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Transparency, governance, and water and sanitation : Experimental evidence from schools in rural Bangladesh
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Development Economics. - : Elsevier. - 0304-3878 .- 1872-6089. ; 163
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Can transparency interventions improve WASH service provision? We use a randomized experiment to evaluate the impacts of a transparency intervention, a deliberative multi-stakeholder workshop initiated with a community scorecard exercise, in schools in rural Bangladesh. To measure impacts, we combine survey data, direct observations, and administrative data. The intervention leads to moderate but consistent improvements in knowledge of WASH standards and practices, and institutions for WASH service management, but does not improve school WASH service provision or change WASH facility use patterns. Drawing on rich descriptive data, we suggest several reasons why the intervention we evaluate did not improve WASH service outcomes and propose ways to improve the design of future interventions.
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| 3. |
- Cocciolo, Serena, et al.
(författare)
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Do Community Water Sources Provide Safe Drinking Water? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Rural Bangladesh
- 2021
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Ingår i: The World Bank Economic Review. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0258-6770 .- 1564-698X. ; 35:4, s. 969-998
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Health, and in turn income and welfare, depend on access to safe drinking water. Although the majority of rural households worldwide obtain drinking water from community water sources, there is limited evidence about how effectively these sources provide safe drinking water. This study combines a randomized experiment with water quality testing to evaluate the impact of a program that provides community deep tubewells in rural Bangladesh. The program reduces exposure to arsenic, a major natural pollutant, but not fecal contamination. Households may use fewer sources with fecal contamination, but any such effects are offset by recontamination through transport and possibly storage. The results suggest that while community deep-tubewell construction programs may reduce exposure to arsenic in Bangladesh, reducing exposure to fecal contamination may require interventions that go beyond community sources.
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| 4. |
- Cocciolo, Serena, 1987-
(författare)
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Participatory Governance and Public Service Provision
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How do Community Contribution Requirements Affect Local Public Good Provision? Experimental Evidence from Safe Water Sources in Bangladesh We exploit the random assignment of communities selected to receive a safe drinking water program to various contribution requirements: cash, labor or no requirement to contribute. Imposing a cash contribution requirement greatly decreases program take-up, while imposing a labour contribution does not. Program impact is correspondingly lower under the cash contribution requirement than under the labour contribution requirement or contribution waiver. The cash contribution requirement screens out communities with low arsenic contamination, but screening does not lead to increased treatment effects on the treated. Our results suggest that there are substantial welfare gains to be made in such projects in poor communities by allowing households to contribute in labour rather than cash.
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| 5. |
- Cocociolo, Serera, et al.
(författare)
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Time is not money : randomized experiment with community contribution requirements in cash and labour
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Development projects that set out to provide local public goods and services almost universally require communities to contribute collectively towards project costs. But despite the ubiquity of such requirements, we know little with certainty about their consequences, including whether consequences differ when communities contribute in cash or labour. Using a randomized experiment, we evaluate how requiring communities to contribute affects the impact of projects that aim to provide safe drinking water wells in rural Bangladesh. Cash contribution requirements strongly reduce take-up and impact relative to a contribution waiver. Labour contribution requirements with similar value if priced at the market wage do not, most likely because most households value their time below the market wage. These results suggest that in poor rural areas, where the monetary value of time is low, projects that require contributions may realize substantial welfare gains by replacing cash contribution requirements with labour contribution requirements. However, imposing any contribution requirement increases coordination and monitoring costs. After accounting for these costs, requiring communities to contribute decreases cost-effectiveness, undermining a central rationale for imposing such requirements.
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| 6. |
- Habib, Md. Ahasan, et al.
(författare)
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How to clean a tubewell : the effectiveness of three approaches in reducing coliform bacteria
- 2023
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Ingår i: Science of the Total Environment. - : Elsevier BV. - 0048-9697 .- 1879-1026. ; 872, s. 161932-161932
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Access to safe drinking water in rural Bangladesh remains a perpetual challenge. Most households are exposed to either arsenic or faecal bacteria in their primary source of drinking water, usually a tubewell. Improving tubewell cleaning and maintenance practices might reduce exposure to faecal contamination at a potentially low cost, but whether current cleaning and maintenance practices are effective remains uncertain, as does the extent to which best practice approaches might improve water quality. We used a randomized experiment to evaluate how effectively three approaches to cleaning a tubewell improved water quality, measured by total coliforms and E. coli. The three approaches comprise the caretaker's usual standard of care and two best-practice approaches. One best-practice approach, disinfecting the well with a weak chlorine solution, consistently improved water quality. However, when caretakers cleaned the wells themselves, they followed few of the steps involved in the best-practice approaches, and water quality declined rather than improved, although the estimated declines are not consistently statistically significant. The results suggest that, while improvements to cleaning and maintenance practices might help reduce exposure to faecal contamination in drinking water in rural Bangladesh, achieving widespread adoption of more effective practices would require significant behavioural change.
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| 7. |
- Habib, Md. Ahasan, 1978-
(författare)
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Increasing the impact and sustainability of safe drinking water supply systems in rural Bangladesh : Randomized experiments with interventions in project life cycle
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Tillgång till rent dricksvatten är en global utmaning, vilket återspeglas i hållbar utvecklingsmål 6. I Bangladesh är det en brådskande fråga att överbrygga klyftan mellan de som har säkert hanterat dricksvatten och de med förbättrade källor. Denna studie uppskattar orsakssamband mellan ingrepp i projektets livscykel och deras inverkan på hållbar tillgång till rent dricksvatten på landsbygden. En serie randomiserade kontrollförsök (RCT) genomfördes i olika regioner i Bangladesh under 15 år av rörbrunnskonstruktionsprogram för att tillhandahålla arsenikfritt dricksvatten. RCT:erna utvärderade förändringar av beslutsprocesser, bidragskrav och underhållspraxis. Gemenskapens deltagande i beslutsprocesser kan öka effekten och hållbarheten hos program för säkert dricksvatten. Att kräva att samhällen bidrar ekonomiskt eller genom arbetskraft ökar inte nödvändigtvis programmets genomslagskraft, och det kan leda till minskat utnyttjande och minskad kostnadseffektivitet, även om det kan öka hållbarheten. Gemenskapens vattenkällor är mindre effektiva än förväntat på grund av föroreningar som införts under kollektiv användning och problem som rör transport och lagring: de bidrar till att minska exponeringen för arsenik men tar inte upp avföringskontamination effektivt. Desinficering av brunnar med en svag klorlösning minskade fekal kontaminering. Vaktmästares standardrengöringsmetoder följer i allmänhet inte bästa praxis och kan försämra vattenkvaliteten. Utbildning av vaktmästare i bästa praxis visade sig dock vara mycket effektiv för att minska. Escherichia coli-kontamination, vilket avsevärt förbättrar vattenkvaliteten. Trots vissa brister i vaktmästarens återkallande och efterlevnad, belyser dessa resultat den avgörande roll som korrekta rengörings- och underhållsmetoder spelar för att minska exponeringen för fekal kontaminering på landsbygden i Bangladesh, för att säkerställa tillgång till rent dricksvatten. Studien belyser kraften hos RCT:er för att ta itu med komplexa orsaksfrågor relaterade till säker tillgång till dricksvatten. Även om värdefulla insikter har uppnåtts, understryker studien att många obesvarade frågor kvarstår, vilket understryker det pågående behovet av forskning inom detta kritiska område. Sammanfattningsvis ger denna studie viktiga bevis om hur man kan förbättra projektdesign och därmed öka tillgången till säkert dricksvatten på landsbygden i Bangladesh.
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| 8. |
- Habib, Md. Ahasan, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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Training caretakers to clean community wells is a highly cost-effective way to reduce exposure to coliform bacteria
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Annan publikation (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Progress on improving access to safe drinking water is glacial, and existing strategies for improving access have met with only limited success. We consider an often neglected dimension of water infrastructure provision: cleaning. We randomly assigned caretakers of community wells to participate in a one-off training workshop about how to clean wells. Thirteen to seventeen months later, wells with caretakers assigned to receiving training have negligible rates of contamination with Escherichia coli and almost half the rates of contamination with any coliform bacteria, compared to control wells whose caretakers did not receive training. We estimate that the cost of preventing exposure to coliform bacteria in drinking water is US$0.88 per person and that if scaled up, each US$2034 spent on the intervention could avoid the death of a child. The results suggest that researchers and policy-makers who wish to increase access to safe drinking water should pay more attention to the unglamorous but important topic of cleaning.
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| 9. |
- Habib, Md Ahasan, et al.
(författare)
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When Does Community Participation in Decision-Making Improve Outcomes? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Bangladesh.
- 2023
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Development practitioners have long advocated for targeted beneficiary communities to participate in decision-making about how to provide local public goods and services. However, community participation in decision-making may have disadvantages as well as benefits, and the balance between the benefits and disadvantages may vary across different decision- making processes, interventions, and contexts. Previous studies of community participation in decision-making indeed report mixed results, but the underlying reasons for this remain uncertain. This study demonstrates that context matters. We investigate the heterogeneity of impacts in a field experiment conducted in two regions of rural Bangladesh. The experiment randomly assigns different decision-making processes to villages that receive otherwise identical interventions in the form of a program to increase access to safe drinking water. We show that a deliberative, consensus-based approach to community participation in decision- making has strongly heterogeneous effects compared to either a top-down approach or community decision-making without rules about how decisions are made. The consensus- based process doubles the program's impact in one region but barely increases it in the other. We use machine learning to identify the baseline characteristics and mechanisms that correlate most strongly with impact. The results suggest that the consensus-based process yields better outcomes when there is more at stake: specifically, when the community has fewer pre-existing safe sources of drinking water and thus more to gain from the intervention. The results are consistent with the view that inclusive participatory approaches to decision- making can increase program impacts but fully engaging in these processes is costly. When less is at stake, communities may not fully engage, and the advantages of inclusive participatory decision-making may not be realized.
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| 10. |
- Linnros, Evelina, 1990-
(författare)
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Essays on Fertility and Health
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Infertility Risk and Child MarriageThe high infertility rates observed in some developing countries may have broad societal impacts, for example by people marrying and having children at a young age to increase their chances of reaching their fertility target. I study the link between infertility risk and marriage timing using data from Madagascar. Specifically, I focus on how infertility risk affects the probability of child marriage, a practice associated with adverse outcomes for young brides and their children. I use spatial variation in exposure to the parasite schistosomiasis. The empirical strategy compares two strains of this parasite, similar in their transmission mechanisms and health impacts, except that one of the two strains causes infertility. In my data, exposure to this strain increases the probability that a woman is infertile by 40%. I find that exposure to the infertility-causing strain increases the probability of child marriage and early fertility by 22%.Maternal Health and Labor Market OutcomesWe study how severe injuries related to childbirth affect mothers' labor market outcomes. 1 in 20 first-time mothers who have a vaginal delivery suffer a severe birth tear, which can have long-lasting adverse impacts on their health and quality of life. Using a difference-in-differences design with a matched control group, we find that severe birth tears lead to a 6% higher earnings loss in the first five years after childbirth compared to the control group. The effect is larger for mothers from low SES backgrounds, while high SES mothers are found to seek more healthcare following their injury.Alcohol Availability, Prenatal Conditions and Midlife Mental Health We examine the long-term mental health effects of an 8.5-month policy experiment that led to a sharp and unexpected increase in alcohol availability, focusing on individuals exposed to the policy in utero. We use administrative healthcare and drug prescription records to identify individuals who have received treatment for a mental health disorder. Prenatal exposure to the policy had a large and persistent effect on mental health: the exposed cohort is 16% more likely to be treated for a mental disorder in midlife. The effect is largest for those exposed from the second trimester and is only partly explained by the lower earnings observed among exposed individuals.The Value of Monitoring for Disaster Prevention: The Desert LocustMonitoring systems are meant to detect early signs of potentially disastrous outbreaks of diseases and pests, in time for preventative action. These monitoring systems are costly, and identifying their economic value requires estimating damages from outbreaks in empirical settings where monitoring is neither uniform nor exogenous. We estimate the value of monitoring systems for desert locusts, known to devour entire agricultural fields. We leverage conflict and weather events in breeding areas to detect the effects of monitoring interruptions on swarm outbreaks. We then reconstruct the spatial patterns of locust migrations to propagate these effects on swarm outbreaks beyond breeding areas. Finally, we show that in-utero exposure to a swarm increases the probability of stunting by 16%. These estimates allow us to quantify the effects of a change in monitoring efforts on subsequent locust swarms and on human health.
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