Characterization of the demand for environmental health improvements in developing countries
I first became interested in the connections between the environment and health while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa, where I was posted with a small private sector sanitation service provider (the GIE Sema Saniya, now known as Saniya Diabeso) to help it design and monitor construction of a pilot system for management and treatment of septage pumped from private and community latrines. This experience was truly life-altering for me, as it challenged my environmental engineering training by thrusting me into an experiential crash course on the realities of infectious diseases in lower-income countries.
Since my Peace Corps service ended in the spring of 2004, I have contributed to a variety of field-based environment and development research efforts, to better understand household preferences for health-improving technologies and behaviors. These have included:
- A post Peace Corps service research assistantship at SANDEC in Switzerland, during which I worked to consolidate lessons from my Peace Corps work with Sema Saniya;
- Implementing a household survey in Beira, Mozambique, to understand private demand for cholera vaccines;
- Conducting a field experiment on the role of water quality information in affecting household water and hygiene behaviors in rural Andhra Pradesh, India;
- Understanding households responses to changes in water pricing;
- Designing a study focused on understanding preferences for point-of-use chlorination in peri-urban communities in Cambodia, and implementing a water quality information experiment there;
- Describing the health effects of naturally-occurring groundwater contamination in the Rift Valley, Ethiopia, and investigating the relationship between household risk preferences and community trust and environmental health and agricultural decisions using experimental games;
- Working to understand baseline cooking practices in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, India, and implementing an experiment to enhance adoption and use of cleaner-burning cookstoves;
- Designing an evaluation of a program to disseminate clean-burning cookstoves in Udaipur, Rajasthan, as part of a larger study (joint with Seva Mandir and IIM-Udaipur) to understand complementarity in environmental health investments;
- Review work and commentaries related to household air pollution.
