Constraints on foreign aid effectiveness in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) sector

Abstract

Numerous studies have sought to empirically test the effectiveness of foreign aid as a tool for international development, with often inconsistent or contradictory results. New sources of disaggregated aid data now allow researchers to test the impact of individual sectors of aid on sector-specific outcomes. The paper investigates the effectiveness of foreign aid in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) sector and seeks to identify constraints on WaSH aid effectiveness in recipient countries. Multilevel latent growth, dynamic panel, and instrumental variable regression models were estimated on a panel dataset comprising 125 recipient countries over 20 years. WaSH aid was consistently associated with improved health outcomes in middle-income countries; no effect on those outcomes was observed in low-income countries. Potential constraints on the effectiveness of WaSH aid – including political, economic, institutional, and technical constraints – were examined using subgroup analysis. The effectiveness of WaSH aid was found to have been constrained by government ineffectiveness and regulatory quality in recipient countries. Countries with large rural populations also appear to have benefitted less from WaSH aid than more urbanized recipient countries.

Evaluating Water- and Health-related Development Projects: A Cross-project and Micro-based Approach

“…The reduced magnitude of the coefficients in comparison to table 1 suggests that not only the number of projects is of relevance but potentially the pure presence of the World Bank with one project can help to induce positive effects. Under the assumption that our fixedeffects strategy captures all relevant confounding factors, World Bank projects causally affect the time to water sources, the quality of drinking water and the type of toilets, while there is no statistically significant relationship with the number of dead children once additional controls are included.Our main results are largely consistent with the literature (see, e.g Botting et al, 2010, Gopalan and Rajan, 2016and Wayland, 2017. who all run country-level analyses for individual instead of cluster level analyses 22 ).…”

“…We present an approach that allows ex-post evaluations of multiple development projects worldwide from a micro perspective. Following efforts that investigated the effectiveness of development work in the WASH sector where data is reasonably good and readily available (Botting et al, 2010, Gopalan and Rajan, 2016, Wayland, 2017, Wolf, 2007, we focus on the effect of development projects on the following four indicators: access to and quality of drinking water, toilet types and child mortality. We investigate the impact of projects on welfare of individuals from across the world.…”

Exploring the Role of Health Expenditure and Maternal Mortality in South Asian Countries: An Approach towards Shaping Better Health Policy

“…Further, several studies have shown a link between sanitation and improved health outcomes [80,81]. Many former researchers have considered access to water and sanitation for dropping the morbidity of diarrhea, and infants and under-five mortality [82][83][84].…”

Socioeconomic Factors Affecting Water Access in Rural Areas of Low and Middle Income Countries

“…However, literature on the subject illustrates that there is no clear consensus on the effect of aid on improving access to water. Although the studies of [13,28] show a positive relationship between access to water and external financing, other authors such as [9,11] find the opposite. The reason for these disagreements may be for the use of different methodologies and approaches.…”

“…Note that the adoption of socioeconomic variables to understand the situation of water access is also used by Onda et al They do a cluster analysis for water access using similar variables as we use (Gross National Product per capita, ODA, Government Effectiveness) [10]. In addition to these studies our paper is also related to the studies of [11][12][13][14][15][16], in their studies they analyze determinants for water access at a national level, although they concentrated solely on one variable, such as foreign aid [11][12][13] or, if they analyze a number of variables, then they focus only on a specific country or region [14][15][16]. Following these previous studies, the main contribution of our paper is to give a more general perspective.…”