generally, the WHO estimates that 40 billion “woman-hours” are spent carrying water in Africa annually (see Temin and Levine (2009)).

Lack of access to water and sanitation (combined with poor access to transportation services) may also have an adverse, indirect effect on education outcomes for girls— especially in rural areas. Studies have indeed found that when sanitation facilities are lacking, dropout rates for girls tend to be higher.

# _2.2.3 Electricity_

A number of studies have shown that lack of access to electricity acts as a significant constraint on women’s time, by forcing them to rely on fossil fuels and to devote less time to income-generating activities, rearing children and furthering their education, and accessing health care for themselves and their children. For instance, Ilahi (2001) found that women living in rural Peru who rely on firewood or coal as a source of energy tend to allocate a smaller proportion of their time to self-employment activities and a greater proportion of time to housework, compared to women who use gas or electricity. In Kenya, as documented by d’Adda et al. (2009), women devote 2.7 hours a week collecting firewood (compared to 0.3 for men), in addition to the almost 4 hours a week that they spend collecting water.

Lack of access to electricity may also hamper the ability of women to take care of their own health and the health of their children, both directly and indirectly.<sup>13</sup> Infants’ and children’s health may be adversely affected because of greater exposure to indoor air pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels (as discussed in Box 2), or greater exposure to bacteria and parasites due to lack of refrigeration of food and boiling of water. Lack of access to electricity may also affect child health outcomes by increasing the amount of time that women allocate to home production activities and reducing the amount of time that they can devote to raising their children and engaging in market work—which reduces (as noted earlier) the ability of mothers to generate income.

To the extent that it leads to more intensive use of wood charcoal, and thus to environmental degradation, lack of access to electricity may contribute to a larger work burden for children. In turn, children who spend more hours on resource collection work are less likely to go to school; this is particularly so for girls. This means that environmental degradation affects children’s school performance, but the impact on girls may be much more damaging. It has been argued that this may be one explanation for the increased gender gap in education in Malawi (Nankhuni and Findeis (2003)).

# **3.  Analytical Implications**

The evidence reviewed in the previous subsections has important analytical implications for understanding and modeling the links between gender and growth. First, to

> 13Wang (2003) found that access to electricity had the greatest impact on decreasing infant mortality in poor countries compared to other significant variables, namely income, access to water and sanitation, vaccination in the first year of life, and the share of health expenditures to GDP. Similarly, access to electricity explained 64 percent of the variation in mortality among children under five.

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