Deworming improves lives across generations

The persistence of poor health and poverty across generations is a particularly intractable global policy issue. Researchers have long explored how factors that affect children may impact their outcomes later in life — even into the next generation. Longitudinal data, or datasets that track individuals over several decades, is a foundational element of this kind of research.

For instance, research using the Indonesia Family Life Study (IFLS), a longitudinal survey administered in Indonesia since 1993, has supported dozens of studies covering a wide range of topics, including rural vs urban labour productivity gaps (e.g. Hamory et al. 2021, summarised here), intergenerational correlations in health (e.g. Kim et al. 2015), and long-term effects from in-utero exposures during pregnancy (e.g. Majid 2015).

However, these kinds of data sources are uncommon in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), where intergenerational poverty is particularly entrenched, and many datasets also lack experimental or quasi-experimental variation needed for causal inference. This makes estimating intergenerational effects especially challenging in LMICs.

Recent work using the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), a longitudinal dataset that has tracked over 6,500 participants in a school-based deworming programme, provides a striking example of the benefits of these types of data collection efforts. In Walker et al. (2023), we (along with a team of co-authors) make use of unique features of the KLPS to causally estimate intergenerational effects on child mortality from the deworming programme. Despite substantial progress over the last several decades, child mortality rates in numerous LMICs remain elevated, and research has documented geographic persistence (Burstein et al. 2019) and intergenerational persistence in child mortality (Lu and Vogl 2023, summarised here).

Read the full VoxDev article here.