Short-Term Impacts of Solar Lanterns on Child Health: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract

We implemented a 16-month randomised field experiment in unelectrified areas of Bangladesh to identify health impacts of solar lanterns among school-aged children. Our analysis of various health-related indicators – self-reporting, spirometers, and professional medical checkups – showed modest improvements in eye redness and irritation but no noticeable improvement in respiratory symptoms among treated students. Varying the number of solar products received within treatment households did not alter these results. This limited health benefit was not caused by nonutilisation of the products by treated children, spillover effects from treated to control students, or contamination resulting from unfavourable family cooking environments.

Acknowledgements

We thank Rom Adina, Sudhir Chandra Das, Chishio Furukawa, Isabel Gunther, Ehsanul Haque, Christopher Ksoll, Kim Lehrer, Tomohiro Machikita, Jonathan Morduch, Toshi Nakamura, Yasuyuki Sawada, Chikako Yamauchi, the late Mahabub Hossain, and participants of seminars at ETH Zurich, GRIPS, and IDE–JETRO for their insightful comments and suggestions as well as Nayamat Ullah Tasnim and Helal Uddin for their excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to BRAC and Kopernik (and Daiwa Securities) for their generous contributions to our procurement of solar devices and Gana Unnayan Kendra (GUK) for providing great support for the study’s implementation. Financial support from the IDE–JETRO and Sophia University for this research is also gratefully acknowledged. All views and interpretations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the supporting or cooperating institutions. The data and the Stata codes employed in the analysis can be made available by the corresponding author upon request.

Supplementary Materials

Supplementary Materials are available for this article which can be accessed via the online version of this journal available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2018.1443207

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Lumens are a measure of the total amount of visible light from a source, which is different from watt, which measures the amount of energy required to light products. 110 lumens are approximately equal to a three to five watt compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) or eight to 10-watt incandescent.

2. Most of the poor in rural Bangladesh can pay these costs under a flexible or instalment-based payment system, implemented by NGOs like Grameen Shakti.

3. This is the amount of air one can blow out within one second.

4. The total amount of air that one can blow out in one breath.

5. Key outcome variables at follow-up are presented in S1 in Supplementary Materials.

6. FEV1 divided by FVC (FEV1/FVC) shows the proportion of air that one can exhale in one second, of the total amount of air that the person can blow out in one breath.

7. Based on the estimation of Global Lung Function (GLF)-2012, the lower limit of normal (LLN) values for males aged 10–15 is 0.73–0.81 and for females is 0.77–0.84.

8. Exclusion of controls did not alter implications obtained from the regression analysis.

9. Full estimation results are available upon request.

10. While not shown in Table, FEV1/FVC did not improve statistically significantly in all observation periods.

11. F-test on the equality of the coefficient fails to reject the null hypothesis that the coefficients on treatments A and B are statistically equivalent in Columns (f) and (g) in Panel B.

12. Our results might be sensitive to the presence of chimney, type of cooking fuel and stove, and the degree of tobacco smoke exposure. However, we cannot examine those possibilities in detail due to lack of appropriate data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research(B) [17H04548]; amd Institute of Developing Economies [IDE Intensive Research 2014-B-1-04].