Laura Abramovsky, Britta Augsburg, Melanie Lührmann, Francisco Oteiza, Juan Pablo Rud
arXiv 11 Jan 2019 · General Economics · publishedWorld Development (2023) · 25 citations (OpenAlex)
arXiv:1901.03544 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
We study the effectiveness of a community-level information intervention aimed at improving sanitation using a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Nigerian communities. The intervention, Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), is currently part of national sanitation policy in more than 25 countries. While average impacts are exiguous almost three years after implementation at scale, the results hide important heterogeneity: the intervention has strong and lasting effects on sanitation practices in poorer communities. These are realized through increased sanitation investments. We show that community wealth, widely available in secondary data, is a key statistic for effective intervention targeting. Using data from five other similar randomized interventions in various contexts, we find that community-level wealth heterogeneity can rationalize the wide range of impact estimates in the literature. This exercise provides plausible external validity to our findings, with implications for intervention scale-up. JEL Codes: O12, I12, I15, I18.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 2 | Cameron, L., Olivia, S., and Shah, M (2019) Scaling up sanitation: Evidence from an RCT in Indonesia | 0.956 | 8 | 5 | 88% |
| 3 | Michalopoulos, S. E. P (2013) Pre-colonial ethnic institutions and contemporary African development | 0.843 | 4 | 3 | 75% |
| 4 | Romano, J. P. and Wolf, M (2005) Stepwise multiple testing as formalized data snooping | 0.822 | 9 | 3 | 56% |
| 5 | Meager, R (2019) Understanding the average impact of microcredit expansions: A Bayesian hierarchical analysis of seven randomized experiments | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Guiteras, R., Levinsohn, J., and Mobarak, A. M (2015) Sanitation subsidies. Encouraging sanitation investment in the developing world: a cluster-randomized trial | 0.811 | 4 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Patil, S. R., Arnold, B. F., Salvatore, A. L., Briceño, B., Ganguly,… (2014) The effect of India's Total Sanitation Campaign on defecation behaviors and child health in rural Madhya Pradesh: a cluster rand… | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | Briceno, B., Coville, A., Gertler, P., and Martinez, S (2017) Are there synergies from combining hygiene and sanitation promotion campaigns: Evidence from a large-scale cluster-randomized tr… | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 9 | Kar, K. and Chambers, R (2008) Handbook on Community-Led Total Sanitation, volume 44 | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 10 | Deaton, A. and Cartwright, N (2018) Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
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