Determinants of Malnutrition Among Children in Rural Farm Households in Ogun State, Nigeria

Abstract

Malnutrition in children is one of the most serious public health problems in Nigeria and also in the world. Therefore, the objective of the study was to measure the prevalence of stunting, wasting and underweight and to assess the socio economic factors that influence the anthropometric indicators among children residing in rural farm households of Ogun State Nigeria. A cross sectional study was employed and 206 farm households were interviewed using a structured, personally administered questionnaire consisting of socio-demographic factors, maternal characteristics, farm production characteristics and anthropometric measurement was used to gather data for 100 children. Nutri-survey, SPSS and Stata software was used to perform descriptive statistics and logistic regression analyses. The summary statistics of nutritional status of children in the study area revealed that the prevalence of stunting, underweight and wasting was 70%, 25 % and 8%, respectively. In view of World Health Organisation recommendation into two age disaggregated groups, male children were found to be more stunted and wasted than females in the study area. Age(p<0.05) and sex of the child(p<0.05), Farm size(p<0.01), household size(p<0.05), access to safe water(p<0.05), years of formal education of the household head (p<0.05) and access to health services (p<0.01) are factors that significantly affect the incidence of stunting, underweight and wasting in the study area. Thus, efforts should be made to improve the health services and also provision of safe water to farm households for reducing malnutrition among children.

Nutrition Outcomes of Under-five Children of Smallholder Farm Households: Do Higher Commercialization Levels Lead to Better Nutritional Status?

“…This nutritional status of the under-5 children members of farm households in the study areas revealed that the percentage of stunted under-5 children is however higher than the national average of 32.0% estimated from the National Nutrition and Health Survey (NNHS) 2018. This result is higher than the report of 23.6% by (Babatunde et al, 2011) in rural Kwara State while it was lower than that of Brhane & Regassa (2014) and Ogunnaike et al, (2020) who found 55.9% and 70% stunting among under-five children in rural Kwara and Ogun States respectively. About 8% of the under-five of cassava farming households were underweight while about 4% were wasted.…”

“…The results of the determinants of under-five malnutrition of cassava farming households (Table7) can be compared with previous studies such as that of Smith et al, ( 2005 ) who employed child z-scores as the dependent variable and used ordinary least square (OLS) regression model while Babatunde et al, ( 2011 ) and Ogunnaike et al, ( 2020 ) used the malnutrition category as the regressand and employed Logit regression model. The first section of the table reveals the results of the factors influencing stunting in cassava farm households.…”

“…Anthropometry is a human body measurements that are mainly used to obtain important nutrition details concerning a sample or population (Babatunde et al, 2011 ). Past farm household studies have applied anthropometric data to under 5-year children in Nigeria (Babatunde et al, 2011 ; Ogunnaike et al, 2020 ; Adeyonu et al, 2022; Ashagidigbi et al, 2022 ). The anthropometric measurements are used in obtaining indices such as HAZ, WAZ and WHZ (Babatunde et al, 2011 ; Slavchevska, 2015 ; Fadare et al, 2019 ; Bhargava et al, 2020 ; Otekunrin,2021b ).…”

Exploring dietary diversity, nutritional status of adolescents among farm households in Nigeria: do higher commercialization levels translate to better nutrition?

“…Anthropometry is a human body measurement which is commonly used to obtain crucial nutrition details about a sample or population (Babatunde et al , 2011). Previous rural farm household studies have applied anthropometric data to under-five children (Babatunde et al , 2011; Ogunnaike et al , 2020). Empirical studies on anthropometric measurements of adolescent members of households especially rural farm households are scarce.…”

“…More so, a study in Northwest Ethiopia also reported 21.8% stunting and 16.9% thinness among school-aged adolescents (Kebede et al, 2021). However, some studies also reported nutrition outcomes and dietary diversity (DD) of both under-five children and women of rural farm households in Nigeria (Lawal and Samuel, 2010;Babatunde et al, 2011;Ukegbu and Ogu, 2017;Ogunnaike et al, 2020;Otekunrin et al, 2022). Likewise, few works have described the relationships that existed between agricultural commercialization and nutritional status of under-five children (Okezie and Nwosu, 2007;Carletto et al, 2017) However, from our knowledge, this study is the first that focuses on the effect of agricultural commercialization on DD and nutrition outcomes of adolescent members of rural farm households.…”