A Comparison of the Nutritional Outcomes of the Children of Labour Migrants and the Children of Non-Migrants, Based on Height-for-Age Measurements in Kenya

Abstract

While much work has been devoted to understanding the causes and broad economic consequences of labour migration, much less has characterized labour migration as a cause of socio-economic inequalities in health. Child malnutrition is one of the most important causes of infant and child mortality in developing countries, with preschool children being particularly vulnerable. It has been estimated that in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the number of underweight children has increased by 8.2 million over the last decade. Traditionally, the remittances migrants return to sending communities are considered an important mechanism for improvements in children's access to education, nutrition and health care. However, migration introduces other constraints to households by allocating most other household responsibilities, including child care and home maintenance, to the remaining parent. The transfer of responsibility and burden may translate directly into a lower level of health inputs provided for children. For this reason, it is not a priori clear that parental labour migration should improve child health. Measuring socio-economic inequalities in a population's health is important because national averages often mask differences within and across sub-groups. For policy purposes it is especially relevant to understand why unfair and avoidable inequalities (or inequities) exist and what actions may be taken to improve equity. Furthermore, such analysis can serve as input to aid in the development of evidence-based policies, and can help programmes to identify the most appropriate mixture of child nutrition interventions. The aim of this paper is to compare the nutritional outcomes of the children of labour migrants, and the children of non-migrants, based on height-for-age measurements. A cross-sectional analytic study design was conducted using data from the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey of 2003. Child health outcomes selected were those that specifically require parental mobility, nutrition, which requires not only money but also time to buy the food, and immunization, which requires travel to medical facilities, were considered in the analysis. Logistic regression was used to identify other independent predictors of stunted growth. From the results, parent migration was not found to have a statistically significant impact on the risk of stunted growth in children. For public health these findings highlight the need to review the scope of health programmes, to include interventions from other sectors such as, agriculture and education. The results show that strategies to address factors contributing to poor health outcomes in children are likely to require collaborative and inter-sectoral actions that are not limited to health authorities or the health system. For Monitoring and evaluation, these findings highlight the need draw on indicators from other sectors during program evaluation.