Blog

I have spent most of the past three days in airports or airplanes going to or coming from Australia. Even in a 26 hour visit, there was enough time for me to be deeply impressed. In particular, this is the...Read More..

Editor's Note: Nicholas Lawson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics, and is the newest member of the r.i.c.e. extended family. Nicholas is a labour economist who has been studying the effect of early life health and...Read More..

Sitting at the Delhi airport at 5:30 am, I noticed a pair of signs. The first was the official, plastic government-sponsored sign for the family restroom: "Baby Care," illustrated with a diaper. The second, printed on what we used to...Read More..

In the coming days we will introduce a new blogger and member of the rice extended family: Nicholas Lawson of the Aix-Marseille School of Economics. Today, you should read his new post on the CLTS blog at IDS: "What's the...Read More..

Today we have a blog post by Nidhi Khurana, our wonderful SQUAT survey team leader. She has been traveling around with our SQUAT team for the past 3.5 months, and she is finally sharing some of her experiences with you...Read More..

We talk about what we learned in Bangladesh, and what India can learn from Bangladesh. Check it out here. And here's a little spoiler, a nice infographic from the article.  ...Read More..

A few days ago, Sangita asked an important question: What makes us think that not knowing the effect of x on y is what is holding back better policies? Do policy-makers even care? Is there any realistic mechanism whereby they...Read More..

Lant Pritchett wrote a blog for the Center for Global Development website last week on how development, including the decade-long RCT movement, is a faith-based activity. He says, "The delightfully quirky aspect of the success of the randomista movement is...Read More..

Have a look at our blog post on the Community Let Total Sanitation blog at the Institute for Development Studies, Sussex! It looks at two questions: How can CLTS inform sanitation policy in rural north India? What are the challenges...Read More..

Without much additional comment, I would like to invite you to read Wolf-Peter Schmidt's important recent essay: The elusive effect of water and sanitation on the global burden of disease, online for free at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tmi.12286/full Schmidt observes that sanitation randomized...Read More..

A few days ago I went with our SQUAT survey team to a village in Tonk, Rajasthan. While walking into the village, I saw a girl of around 8 walking out into the fields off the side of the road...Read More..

This post is a little deeper in the scientific details than r.i.c.e. readers may be used to, but I hope you will stick with us, because it is important. Evidence is building up that enteropathy may matter a great deal....Read More..

Last week I was with the survey team in Jodhpur. Jodhpur is one of 33 districts of Rajasthan state, and has a population of 3.7 million people in the 2011 census, almost exactly the same count as the 3.8 million...Read More..

This is the story of government sanitation funding in one of the villages that the “switching study” visited in Fatehpur district in the end of January. The village is large, even by Uttar Pradesh standards, and its population is diverse...Read More..

Next week's issue of EPW will include an article on what comparing children in Bangladesh with children in the neighboring Indian state of West Bengal can tell us about the determinants of child height. Written by Arabinda Ghosh, Aashish Gupta,...Read More..

Check out the Ideas for India blog post written by our colleague Jeff Hammer. Not only does he discuss some of the work that RICE has been doing linking sanitation to child height, he argues that investing in sanitation would...Read More..