Indoor air pollution and gender difference in respiratory health and schooling for children in Cameroon

Abstract

Indoor air pollution (IAP) resulting from firewood used as cooking fuel is related to the respiratory problems and can lead to the reduction in human capital formation. Using data from the fourth Cameroonian survey of households carried out in 2014, we analyse if exposure to indoor air pollution resulting from the use of firewood provokes respiratory infections and if they have consequences on the education of children according to gender. Our results show that the use of firewood as the main fuel for cooking increases the risk of respiratory infection among girls (but not among boys) and these infections have a negative impact on education.

KEYWORDS:

• Firewood
• indoor air pollution
• respiratory health
• schooling
• trivariate recursive probit model
• gender

JEL CODES::

• Q41
• Q42
• I10
• I20

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for useful comments from anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GCNB63

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Notes

1 The Congo basin is the second largest contiguous block of tropical forest after the Amazon rainforest.

2 In this framework, the urban area is made up of towns of 50,000 inhabitants at most; the semi urban of 10,000 to less than 50,000 inhabitants, and rural areas are agglomerates of less than 10,000 inhabitants.

3 Some patients confirm that they have not been diagnosed after medical consultation.

4 The descriptive statistics of all the variables used are presented in Table 1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Novice Patrick Bakehe

Novice Patrick Bakehe is Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Applied Management (University of Douala-Cameroon). He is also an affiliate researcher at the Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Economics (LTAE) in the same university. His main research interests are related to Development Economics and he is specialized in environmental economics, energy economics and labour economics.