Abstract
BackgroundA small but growing body of research indicates that progress in reducing child malnutrition is substantially uneven from place to place, even down to the district level within countries. Yet child malnutrition prevalence and trend estimates available for public health planning are mostly available only at the level of global regions and/or at country level. To support carefully targeted intervention to reduce child malnutrition, public health planners and policy-makers require access to more refined prevalence data and trend analyses than are presently available. Responding to this need in Ghana, this report presents trends in child malnutrition prevalence in socio-demographic groups within the country’s geographic regions.MethodsThe study uses the Ghana Demographic and Health Surveys (GDHS) data. The GDHS are nationally representative cross-sectional surveys that have been carried out in many developing countries. These surveys constitute one of the richest sources of information currently available to examine time trends in child malnutrition. Data from four surveys were used for the analysis: 1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008.ResultsThe results show statistically significant declining trends at the national level for stunting (F (1, 7204) = 7.89, p ≤ .005), underweight (F (1, 7441) = 44.87, p ≤ .001) and wasting (F (1, 7130) = 6.19, p ≤ .013). However, analyses of the sex-specific trends revealed that the declining trends in stunting and wasting were significant among males but not among females. In contrast to the national trend, there were significantly increasing trends in stunting for males (F (1, 2004) = 3.92, p ≤ .048) and females (F (1, 2004) = 4.34, p ≤ .037) whose mothers had higher than primary education, while the trends decreased significantly for males and females whose mothers had no education.ConclusionsAt the national level in Ghana, child malnutrition is significantly declining. However, the aggregate national trend masks important deviations in certain socio-demographic segments, including worsening levels of malnutrition. This paper shows the importance of disaggregated analyses of national child malnutrition data, to unmask underlying geographic and socio-demographic differences.
Highlights
A small but growing body of research indicates that progress in reducing child malnutrition is substantially uneven from place to place, even down to the district level within countries
The aims of this paper are: [1] to present findings on national child malnutrition prevalence trends in Ghana in the period 1993 to 2008; [2] to disaggregate the national level data to socio-demographic and geographic sub-groups, and [3] to compare and contrast the national level findings on malnutrition with analysis based on the sub-group
The analysis at the national level shows that child malnutrition is significantly declining in Ghana
Summary
A small but growing body of research indicates that progress in reducing child malnutrition is substantially uneven from place to place, even down to the district level within countries. To support carefully targeted intervention to reduce child malnutrition, public health planners and policy-makers require access to more refined prevalence data and trend analyses than are presently available. Responding to this need in Ghana, this report presents trends in child malnutrition prevalence in socio-demographic groups within the country’s geographic regions. In Africa, the prevalence of stunting declined marginally from 40.5% in 1980 to 35.2% in 2000 [3], and between 1990 and 2010 the prevalence of childhood stunting in Africa stagnated at about 40% (2) If this trend continues, we cannot expect significant improvement in the decade. During the same period when stunting decreased in North Africa, it increased in Eastern Africa, while Western Africa showed very little change [3]
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