Happiness on Tap: Piped Water Adoption in Urban Morocco

Abstract

We study the demand for household water connections in urban Morocco, and the effect of such connections on household welfare. In the northern city of Tangiers, among homeowners without a private connection to the city's water grid, a random subset was offered a simplified procedure to purchase a household connection on credit (at a zero percent interest rate). Take-up was high, at 69%. Because all households in our sample had access to the water grid through free public taps (often located fairly close to their homes), household connections did not lead to any improvement in the quality of the water households consumed; and despite significant increase in the quantity of water consumed, we find no change in the incidence of waterborne illnesses. Nevertheless, we find that households are willing to pay a substantial amount of money to have a private tap at home. Being connected generates important time gains, which are used for leisure and social activities, rather than productive activities. Because water is often a source of tension between households, household connections improve social integration and reduce conflict. Overall, within 6 months, self-reported well-being improved substantially among households in the treatment group, despite the financial cost of the connection. Our results suggest that facilitating access to credit for households to finance lump sum quality-of-life investments can significantly increase welfare, even if those investments do not result in income or health gains.

Women Empowerment and Economic Development

“…She finds that electrification led to an increase of 9.5 percentage points in female employment (without any change in male employment) and argues that this increase was due to time freed for women in home production. Devoto et al (2011) find no impact on time devoted to market activities when households became connected to piped water in Morocco, but a significant increase in leisure and reduction in stress levels and intrahouseholds conflicts.…”

Water Hauling and Girls’ School Attendance: Some New Evidence from Ghana

“…Interestingly, in their study the impact of better water access on school attendance is similar for boys and girls. Devoto et al (2012), using a randomized experiment on poor urban households in Morocco, show that a private water connection at home generated important time gains for the households, but found no effects of these time savings in terms of increased labor market participation or higher school completion. 2 The latter however is not surprising since children in the sample were rarely involved in water collection activities (they were fetching water once every two weeks on average at baseline).…”

Infrastructure Public–Private Partnerships in the Developing World: Lessons from Recent Experience

“…Alternatively (or additionally), the government could also subsidise access. The conclusions reached by Devoto et al, 2012 -that private operators may be underestimating lowincome households' willingness to pay for infrastructure services that have major effects on their quality of life -also points to the possibility that private operators may sometimes be misreading market demand.…”

“…Devoto, Duflo, Dupas, Parienté, and Pons (2012) conducted a 'nudge'-type experiment with a private water utility in Morocco, where staff went door-to-door to inform and encourage low-income families in urban Tangiers without a piped water connection to pay for a connection through an interest-free loan. Nearly 70 per cent of those households took up the programme, compared to 10 per cent of households that did not experience active encouragement (that is, the control group).…”