The relationships between housing quality and occupant health in Uganda

The Government of Uganda created in 2010 a strategic plan to invest in public health as part of its broader national development goals. The health plan recognizes housing and urbanization as a determinant of health, but has not yet formulated policy to address the relationship. This study can help guide health policy development as it relates to housing. It estimates relationships between housing quality and occupant health using “count outcome” regression models. An economic model of optimal household labor allocation in poor countries provides the foundation for the regression modeling. The data used to estimate the regressions are a stratified random sample of 7096 households surveyed in the 2005–06 Uganda National Household Survey. They provide, among other things, detailed information on physical housing attributes as well as the health status of its occupants. Consistent with the economic model and other empirical work, the results show that exposure to burning of biomass for cooking has the largest adverse health effect. Different definitions of illness yield results consistent with expectations, and a separate specification test suggests that the findings are reasonably robust.