Explaining Child Malnutrition in Ethiopia: The Role of Socioeconomic Status and Maternal Health on Nutritional Condition of Children

The present study examines the relationship of child under-nutrition with maternal health and socioeconomic status of households using the 2011 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey in the context of Ethiopia. The sample of the study consists of more than 9000 children who are less than five years of age, which can be considered as a larger country representation than the previous EDHS database. The study included a range of socio-demographic indicators with prior consideration on maternal health indicators, parental education, household wealth status and employment status and occupation of parents; which are sought to reduce the extent of the likely bias in a relatively large dataset. Many biological and development evidences have addressed the wide spread negative consequences of malnutrition in early childhood. However, addressing its adverse impacts require to trace out the causes as well as their pathways. In this regard, many researchers have understood the close association between child nutritional status with maternal health as well as socioeconomic status (SES). This indicates that policies targeting maternal health, education and poverty should also embody the reduction of child malnutrition as one of their major objectives. So, addressing the problems associated with this health and development factors helps not only to improve the health of mothers and household socioeconomic status; but for reducing the intergenerational impact of malnutrition as well thereby improving the health of children and contributes to the reduction of mortality. The results of this study confirm that maternal health, household income and maternal education have strong association with short and long-term child nutritional status. In addition, father’s education and employment as well as occupation in most of the non-professional works have a significant association with the short-term child nutritional status at moderate level. The role of maternal employment on short-term child nutritional status shows that it has positive impact on children with low nutritional status and negative for those with higher nutritional status. Besides, mother’s engagement on unskilled labour occupation was found to be a positive factor for the short-term child health. However, the association of parental employment and occupation type with long-term child nutritional status was found to be very weak or almost insignificant at all. Hence, the presence of significant relationships on maternal health and most of the SES factors in our quantified estimates depicts the role of socioeconomic status and maternal health on determining the distribution of child malnutrition, and contextually in Ethiopia.