Imagine, for example, that land is equally productive everywhere but is more densely populated closer to the water source. The further a household is from water, the more land there is per person and the more work there is on the farm. As long as there is not much effect on fertility, such a model predicts that the further a household is from water, the less likely its members will work off-farm. Alternatively, if the model allows for lower productivity of land further away from water, then even if landholdings are larger, land may be so unproductive that pressure to work off-farm is greater. Being further from the water source would therefore push people off-farm, since land is less productive and hence worse for agriculture. Once we purge the estimates of such within area endogeneity of placement and control for observable between area characteristics including seasonality, we find no impacts on women’s off-farm work.<sup>16</sup> We find more support for the hypothesis that a reduction in the time to water has positive impacts on child schooling (Table 8). For both girls and boys, sizeable impacts on enrollments are indicated for Yemen, Morocco, Nepal (1995-96) and Pakistan. For example, a one hour reduction in the time to water would increase girls’ and boys' enrollment rates by about 8-9 percent in Yemen and by 18-19 percent in Pakistan.<sup>17</sup> These impacts are found exclusively for non-African countries.

An undoubtedly important characteristic of these countries is that they are also places where enrollments are low overall, and where the gender gap in those enrollments is particularly pronounced (Table 4). For Yemen, Nepal 1995-96, and Pakistan, the results in Table 8, columns (b) and (c) suggest that as the total time needed for household chores is reduced, the benefits spill over roughly equally to both girls and boys.<sup>18</sup> As we noted earlier, the geographic effects on girls' schooling are also among the strongest for these particular countries, and typically disproportionately stronger for girls than for boys (Table

> 16 In sensitivity checks, we do not find significant effects overall for participation in off-farm work by older women (aged 40 and over); one could surmise that older women, having completed their childbearing, would have more time to work outside the home if their domestic workload improved.

> 17 This echoes anecdotal reports such as reflected in this quote by Dr. Mohamad Al-Hamdi, Deputy Minister of Water and Environment in the Yemen Times, 2009: “...water shortages keep children, especially girls, out of school because long, daily treks to collect water prevent them from attending classes.  When girls grow up with little or no education, they generally have more children.  And because groundwater in Yemen is a finite resource, the more the population grows, the harder it is to find water. The next generation of girls is thus even less likely to get an adequate education as they will be collecting water for their families to survive.” 18 This pattern can also be seen in the difference in schooling impacts across the two Nepal surveys. As the gap between girls' and boys' enrollments has closed between 1995-96 and 2003-04, and enrollment rates have risen, the effect on schooling also disappears for the Nepal 2003-04 survey.

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