Event Detail

Flooding and Health Outcomes in Zambia

Presented by:
Theresa Ng’andu
Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Thursday, April 30, 2026
3:45 pm-5:00 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)

I examine how flooding affects the incidence of confirmed cases of malaria and cholera, and clinical cases of typhoid and dysentery at the ward level (the smallest administrative boundary) by using satellite monthly flood data and health data on health facility visits as recorded by the Ministry of Health in Zambia. Floods are not random, so I control for rainfall, temperature, and geographical factors such as elevation and distance to waterbodies to directly capture variables that affect exposure to flood risk. I also control for economic activity and the number of health facilities in each ward to capture disease transmission. I use month and year fixed effects to control for seasonal variation, and ward fixed effects to control for structural issues local to a ward, and constituency by year fixed effects to control for time-varying ward characteristics such as local migration and the disbursement of ward development funds. For the linear probability model with fixed effects, which are weighted by ward population size, with the dependent variable as the incidence of each disease, the results show that floods increase the incidence of malaria and cholera but not typhoid and dysentery. Using the Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (ppml) for the number of cases of each disease per 100000 of the ward population, I find that one more flood increases the rate of malaria transmission, but the effects on cholera are positive but imprecise. For dysentery and typhoid, there are still no effects.