Abstract
Nutritional outcomes remain an important development indicator and reflect a household's vulnerability to improved quality of life. Drawing upon recent household survey data from Egypt, this paper applies hierarchical models to test the effect of contextual factors on chronic undernutrition among under-five children and identifies the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics that underscore such vulnerability. Results indicate considerable neighborhood effects influencing a household’s nutritional choices. However, no significant effect could be identified for mother’s education and women’s decision-making power, but a clear positive association is evident between nutritional status and better health service utilization as well as child care and feeding practices. Focused intervention strategies need to augment household level behavioral change for these identified factors and supplement such individual efforts with targeted strategies aimed at vulnerable Egyptian communities to reduce child undernutrition.
Highlights
Hunger and nutritional failure signify both the cause as well as the consequence of a household’s vulnerability to economic shocks, chronic and transient, and an important indicator of food insecurity, poverty, and deprivation of wellbeing
We examine relative vulnerability across households and individuals towards adverse nutritional outcomes, from the basic premise that these proximal determinants act in unison to threaten household food security, thereby applying constraints on adequate nutritional requirements among children
The Egyptian Demographic and Health Surveys (EDHSs) are an important source for monitoring the undernutrition problem among Egyptian children, and provide fairly detailed information about the background characteristics of the undernourished children, which helps in identifying the possible risk factors as well
Summary
Hunger and nutritional failure signify both the cause as well as the consequence of a household’s vulnerability to economic shocks, chronic and transient, and an important indicator of food insecurity, poverty, and deprivation of wellbeing. Conventional vulnerability analyses has been predominantly focused on the production and availability of grain staples at the expense of other indicators, such as lack of access to health services, nutritional status, cultural practices, and gender inequality. Such analyses failed to identify which population groups fell at relatively greater risk, and the underlying reasons. The wealth of information on other proximate determinants of child nutritional outcomes at the household level in the DHS datasets allows us to examine vulnerability to chronic and acute nutritional deprivation beyond the direct causality between household food security and nutritional status. We return to explain the variables used to operationalize the framework using the EDHS data
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