Because the main modes of transmission of the COVID-19 virus are respiration and contact, WHO recommends frequent washing of hands with soap under running water for at least 20 seconds. This article investigates how the level of concern about COVID-19 affects the likelihood of washing hands frequently in sub-Saharan Africa. The study makes use of a unique survey dataset from 12 sub-Saharan African countries collected in April 2020 (first round) and May 2020 (second round) and employs an extended ordered probit model with an endogenous covariate.

Access to clean water is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to be achieved by 2030, and a priority on the environmental policy agenda in Ethiopia. A main challenge for clean water supply utilities is how to accommodate watershed protection and management costs. The type of land cover around water sources has a notable effect on the cleanliness of the water and hence on water purifying costs.

Over a dozen studies have examined how households who travel to collect water (about one quarter of humanity) make choices about where and how much to collect. There is little evidence, however, that these studies have informed rural water supply planning in anything but a qualitative way. In this note, we describe a new web-based decision support tool that planners or community members can

We investigate whether a social information campaign aimed at reducing water use causes a spillover effect on the use of electricity. On average, water use decreased by 6 percent for the treatment group. We identify a positive spillover effect on electricity use among households that had efficient use of water before the campaign. The effect is sizeable: almost a 9 percent reduction. We argue that these results are consistent with a model of cognitive dissonance where the efficient households infer information about electricity use from the water use information.

For countries where the agricultural sector supports a majority of the population as in Uganda, the link between poverty and land degradation is of great significance. Soil and water conservation technologies are a recommended means of reducing degradation rates. However, ex-ante and ex-post analyses of the impact of these technologies remain few.

Using a dynamic Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of Uganda, we simulate the effects of water shortages and their impact on agricultural production and the broader Ugandan economy. It is expected that Ugandan crop production will be hit hard over the next forty years by increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation associated with climate change. We use forecasts from the literature for ten specific crop outputs to simulate the effects of weather-related agricultural disruption on the rest of the economy.