Can Community Water Projects Combat Child Diarrhea? Results From the Solomon Islands

There is a vast amount of existing literature that has empirically scrutinized whether or not community water projects have the ability to mitigate diarrheal disease. A strong and persistent belief thinks that community water projects do have the means, however, over the decades empirical work commonly finds this to simply not be true. This study expands the research question to the Solomon Islands. The research tests the hypothesis using a differences-in-differences identification strategy by utilizing the government’s staggered timing rollout of community water subprojects with whether or not a village received a community water subproject to test for a program effect. The research does not, however, find a statistically significant RDP water subproject effect on child diarrhea. Instead rather only a statistically significant correlation can be suggested. Alternatively, the research then explores plausible outcomes that could have also been affected by RDP water subprojects that are correlated and controlled for in the child diarrhea model to try and gain traction on explaining the non-effect child diarrhea results. The analysis on the sub-outcomes also concludes little significant effects. The results find suggest that households living in villages that received a water subproject are 27 percent more likely to consume water from an improved water source in the dry season, and that the time to fetch water could have been cut by nearly half. Although the results suggest that RDP water subprojects affected these two outcomes the analysis overall struggles to find statistical significance to be able to identify changes and determinants of child diarrhea