Socio-economic determinants of nutritional status of children in Ethiopia

This study aims to assess the nutritional status and associated factors of children age five years and below in Ethiopia. The study uses secondary data obtained from 2011 Ethiopian demographic and health survey SPSS stored data. A total of9622 of children aged five years and below which contain the necessary information were considered in this study, analysed within a theoretical framework based on a health production function. Descriptive, binary and multiple logistic regression analyses were performed using STATA version 12 and R version 3.1.1. Thirty five percent and 37percent of children were underweight and stunted. The results from bivariate chi-square analysis indicated that a number of variables were significantly related to underweighting and stunting. In addition to analyzing underweighting and stunting for the whole sample, we have also separately analyzed for urban and rural households, and found that the determinants differed. Electric power and television access, longer period of formal schooling of mothers and higher wealth status of households negatively affect underweighting of children belongs in urban Ethiopia. With increasing urban child age risk of underweighting increased. Similarly in rural areas, instead of mothers' fathers longer period of formal education was observed to have negative effect on underweighting of children. In addition, those factors had insignificant correlation with underweighting in urban, having short distance to health services, mothers used contraceptive, absence of fever and diarrhea recently, toilet access, radio possession of households were negatively associated with underweighting of children living in rural Ethiopia. In other way, mother uses contraceptive, absence of diarrhea recently, household's television possession, and having higher wealth status negatively affect rural child stunting. Older and vaccinated rural children have greater possibility to be stunted. Having electric power in the household, longer period of formal schooling of mothers, and television possessions of households shown to be associated with less child stunting in urban. Moreover, the risks of stunting increased with age of child in urban and rural. Regional variations have also strong impact on child stunting and underweighting in urban and rural parts of Ethiopia. Finally, based on the results of the study, the paper proposes several policies aimed at improving the delivery of nutrition to more effectively address the problem of malnutrition. Key words: Height-for-age Z-score, weight-for-age Z-score, underweighting, stunting