Inequalities in adolescent learning: Does the timing and persistence of food insecurity at home matter?

Abstract

Highlights  We investigated adolescent learning disparities by household food insecurity trajectories during childhood in a large emerging economy  "Value-added" models of achievements included early-life cognition and extensive child and household controls  Heterogeneity by timing of occurrence and persistence of food insecurity, and by skill, was present  Chronic household food insecurity and early childhood food security at home followed by later food security were the largest predictors of impaired cognitive skills at 12 years  Food security programmes may have important learning spillovers

Household food insecurity and early childhood development: Longitudinal evidence from Ghana

“…which, following the literature, could moderate the relation between child outcomes and food security [24,62,63]. Our results suggest that household food insecurity during the preschool and early primary years is associated with lower child development outcomes, and that the size of the coefficients related to food insecurity, when significant, is rather large.…”

“…We also included a vector of child, caregiver, and household controls X i,1 . The choice of covariates was informed by their extensive theoretical and empirical linkage to food insecurity and child development outcomes [15,16,24,61]. All standard errors were clustered at the wave 1 school-level.…”

“…Belachew and co-authors [22] found that household food insecurity predicted lower educational attainment, while Tamiru and colleagues [23] showed household food insecurity was associated with greater rates of school absenteeism. With regards to other LMICs, Aurino, Fledderjohann and Vellakkal [24] found that in India, food insecurity at age five had large associations with impaired learning outcomes at age 12. In China, Hannum, Liu, and Frongillo [25] showed that food insecurity was associated with poorer educational outcomes of rural children.…”

“…The relation between degree of persistency of food insecurity and child development may also vary by the specific skill considered. For instance, there is some evidence that for some domain-specific skills such as numeracy, for which each competence directly builds on the previous, even transitory spells of household food insecurity at home can be detrimental [24], whereas domain-general skills such as social-emotional development may be less affected by intermittent food insecurity spells.…”

Nutritional Status from 1 to 15 Years and Adolescent Learning for Boys and Girls in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam

“…The result for PPVT in particular may highlight the link between early childhood malnutrition and vocabulary development, which starts in early childhood and it is consolidated between ages 3 and 6 years (Jalongo and Sobolak 2011). Math and reading skills, by contrast, are formed later in life when the child is already in school, whereby concurrent investments in nutrition and education, as well the quality of the overall educational environment, could play relatively larger roles as compared to early-life circumstances (Aurino et al 2019). Fourth, in most cases, the coefficients related to early-life nutrition do not differ by gender.…”