Breaking Barriers: How Women's Empowerment Affects Children's Nutrition Status – Further Analysis of the 2016 and 2019 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey

Abstract

Background: The issue of women and children is integral to the 17 SDGs adopted by all UN member states in 2015 and all dimensions of inclusive and sustainable development. But women's empowerment and children's nutritional status are challenges at different levels across the globe, especially in developing countries, including Ethiopia, making it essential to identify the characteristics of these children and their caregivers. Thus, the overarching objective of this study was to investigate how women's empowerment affects the nutritional status of children in Ethiopia. Methods: We used the 2016 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) and 2019 Ethiopia Mini Demographic and Health Survey (EMDHS) data to investigate how women's empowerment affects the nutritional status of children in Ethiopia. Stunting and wasting were the two indicators of a child's nutritional status. We tried to operationalize women's empowerment by three validated measures which comprised three latent domains from the survey: social and human assets, intrinsic agency, and instrumental agency. We used multivariate probit regression to find out the significant factors which influence the children’s health status. Results: The study found that improvements in women's empowerment were not significantly associated with a reduction in stunting and wasting in Ethiopia. But the study discovered that women's educational attainment and other variables significantly influenced their children's nutrition status. Conclusions: The insignificant direct association between women's empowerment and stunting or wasting in children in Ethiopia could be due to various factors, including the lack of standardized indexes for measuring women's empowerment, social desirability bias in survey responses, and missing data. However, it is still essential to consider and prioritize women's empowerment because it may indirectly contribute to reducing stunting and wasting in children by improving other underlying factors. Therefore, we recommend future research should carefully select women's empowerment indicators in context-specific ways, aggregate them meaningfully, and use appropriate statistical methods to account for desirability bias and related issues.