an unshared toilet facility compared to urban households (DHS, 2016). Within urban communities, slum dwellers are poorly served. Only 13 percent of households in the country’s slums have access to their own sanitation facilities (World Bank, 2018). It is common for 10 households or more to share a single sanitation facility (World Bank, 2018). Shared sanitation facilities are considered more unhygienic compared to private ones. As a result, children living in urban slums are more likely to be stunted compared to those living in other urban areas (World Bank, 2018).

Poor sanitation could affect the timing of children’s school enrollment. For example, repeated diarrhea and environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) could result in malnutrition, which could negatively affect early childhood cognitive development indicators such as learning abilities and motor skills. As a result, parents could be motivated to keep their children at home, waiting for them to grow and get stronger. Several studies have investigated the impact of water quality at the community level on education outcomes (Beach et al., 2016; Zhang & Xu, 2016). However, studies on the impact of sanitation on education outcomes are virtually non-existent.

In this study it is hypothesized that exposure to poor sanitation early in life, defined as the prevalence of unimproved sanitation facilities in the community,<sup>5</sup> adversely affects young children’s school enrollment.<sup>6</sup> Due to poor sanitation, the child is likely to be enrolled in primary school late (or not at all). Conversely, a child who is exposed to improved sanitation is more likely to be enrolled in primary school on time. It should also be noted that delayed enrollment in primary school can have a serious impact on a child’s cognitive development.<sup>7</sup> We use the children’s residence (specifically communities known to have unimproved sanitation), and the primary school enrollment data at the time of the survey. The goal of the paper is to determine whether exposure to unimproved sanitation early in life negatively affects the likelihood of being enrolled in primary school between ages 6 and 9. Are children exposed to unimproved sanitation facilities early in life less likely to attend primary school?

Our findings indicate that unimproved sanitation has a negative and significant impact on primary school enrollment. A child’s early exposure to unimproved sanitation decreases that child’s likelihood of being enrolled in primary school by 6 to 9 percentage points on average compared to a child with access to improved sanitation. The effect is particularly strong – a difference of 8 to 10 percentage points – for children ages 6 to 7. It is also strong for children living in rural areas. We find that the results are statistically robust to errors due to potential omitted variable bias.

> 5 We define “community” in the data set as a household cluster.

> 6 We define school enrollment as primary school enrollment for children between 6 and 9 years.

> 7 See, for example, Sclar et al. (2017) and Cole and Cole (1996), who reviewed findings from several studies conducted in lowand middle-income countries where schooling is not universal. For example, the memory performance of schooled children is comparable to their American counterparts, unlike unschooled children from the same village (Cole et al., 1971).

3