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Theoretical arguments lead to the conclusion that there should be more land-secured credit, more investment, a more active land market, and more inequality of land in a community under freehold tenure compared with one in which the state owns and allocates the land. Detailed evidence from two communities in Kenya and Tanzania suggests that none of these conclusions holds because the stated policy differences do not in fact cause the land markets to perform differently in the two countries. These results are in broad agreement with other studies conducted in Africa in recent years that indicate that indigenous land tenure arrangements provide considerable security for investment and continue to have strong impacts on land markets even when they are no longer in effect according to the law.

As the disease burden of poor access to water and sanitation declines around the world, the nonhealth benefits--mainly the time burden of water collection -will likely grow in importance in sector funding decisions and investment analyses. We measure the coping costs incurred by households in one area of rural Kenya. Sixty percent of the 387 households interviewed were collecting water outside the home, and household members were spending an average of 2-3 h doing so per day. We value these time costs using an individual-level value of travel time estimate based on a stated preference experiment. We compare these results to estimates obtained assuming that the value of time saved is a fraction of unskilled wage rates. Coping cost estimates also include capital costs for storage and rainwater collection, money paid either to water vendors or at sources that charge volumetrically, costs of treating diarrhea cases, and expenditures on drinking water treatment (primarily boiling in our site). Median total coping costs per month are approximately US$20 per month, higher than average household water bills in many utilities in the United States, or 12% of reported monthly cash income. We estimate that coping costs are greater than 10% of income for over half of households in our sample. They are higher among larger and wealthier households, and households whose primary source is not at home. Even households with unprotected private wells or connections to an intermittent piped network spend money on water storage containers and on treating water they recognize as unsafe.

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