Map 4.1 Percentage of children who live in households that use surface water Map 4.2 Percentage of children who live in households that are more than a 15-minute walk to the water source Map 4.3 Percentage of children who live in households that do not have access to any sanitation facilities whatsoever in or near their homes 86
5 Shelter Deprivation This chapter focuses on two household characteristics: dwellings with mud floors and homes that do not have electricity. The analyses included data on children up to 17 years of age. 5.1 Living in Houses with Mud Floors The growing number and size of slums worldwide demonstrates that the slums are crucial elements of contemporary urbanization in developing countries (Morakinyo et al., 2012). Over 640 million children in the developing world live in overcrowded homes or dwellings with mud floors (UNICEF, 2005). Researchers have found an association in sub-Saharan Africa between living in houses with mud floors and health and nutritional problems. Dumba et al. (2008) found in the Luweero district of Uganda that, among children under age 5, living in a house with a mud floor was associated with the risk of having helminth infection. Ainsworth and Semali (2000), studying children under the age of 60 months in the Kagera region of Tanzania, found an association between a recent adult death in households with a dirt floor and substantially higher child morbidity. Ainsworth and Semali also found that better housing (e.g., having a concrete, tiled, or wooden floor instead of a dirt floor) was the only household-level socioeconomic variable with a strongly positive relationship to children’s weight-for-height. Children in households with concrete, wood, or tile floors had weight-for-height z-scores 0.2 SD higher than children in households with dirt floors. Finally, a recent study by Mohammed and Tamiru (2013) in Arba Minch Zuria, southern Ethiopia, found that children under five years old living in houses with mud floors were more likely to have diarrhea than their counterparts living in houses with cement floors. In sub-Saharan Africa the percentage of children under 18 years of age who lived in houses with mud floors was very inconsistent, from 16% in Madagascar to 95% in Chad (see Map 5.1). In Burundi and Ethiopia 9 of every 10 children lived in a house with mud floors (see Table 5.1). Three of every four children lived in houses with mud floors in Malawi, Mali, Niger, Tanzania, and Uganda. More than half of children in Burkina Faso, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zambia, as well, lived in houses with mud floors. Sex and geographic disparities Generally, there were no child sex disparities related to living in a house with a mud floor (see Figure 5.1). However, in four countries—Cameroon, Kenya, Liberia, and Tanzania—the percentage of children living in houses with mud floors was about 2 percentage points higher for boys than girls (see Table 5.1). In every country the percentage of children living in houses with mud floors was higher in rural areas than in urban areas (see Figure 5.2). This disparity reached more than 60 percentage points in Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, and Namibia, and in Zambia the difference was 70 percentage points. In Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Malawi, Niger, Tanzania, and Uganda as well, the difference exceeded 50 percentage points (see Table 5.1). The role of the household head’s sex and age In two-thirds of these sub-Saharan African countries, the percentage of children living in houses with mud floors was higher for children living with a male rather than a female head of household (see Figure 5.3). This difference was about 15 percentage points in four countries—Burkina Faso (male household head: 60% and female household head: 44%), Guinea (56% and 40%), Nigeria (43% and 28%), and Senegal (41% and 22%) (see Table 5.1). The inverse appeared in Namibia, where the percentage of children living in a house with mud floors was nearly 10 percentage points higher for 87
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