Prevalence of child malnutrition in agro-pastoral households in Afar Regional State of Ethiopia

Abstract

Based on data generated from 180 randomly selected households with children age under five years old in Aysaita district of Afar region of Ethiopia, this study explored prevalence of malnutrition and scrutinized household characteristics, maternal characteristics, specifics of the child and economic variables associated with child malnutrition. The height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ), weight-for-height Z-scores (WHZ) and weight-for-age Z-scores (WAZ) were used to measure the extent of stunting, wasting and underweight, respectively. The results revealed that prevalence of long term nutritional imbalance and malnutrition status indicator (i.e. stunting) was 67.8%. The short term measure (wasting) was found to be 12.8% and underweight was found to be 46.1%. Moreover, children in households which are headed by women, and characterized by more dependency ratio, less access to assets, health services and institutions are more likely to be undernourished.

Predictors of poor nutritional status among children aged 6–24 months in agricultural regions of Mali: a cross-sectional study

“…Our results, which are confirmed by earlier studies [35][36][37], also highlighted the fact that children born to mothers who gave birth to five or more children had a higher likelihood of being undernourished than children who were born to mothers with fewer children. It seems obvious that families with a large number of children are more vulnerable to economic constraints resulting from the need to fulfill the nutritional needs of the household.…”

“…Inadequate allocation of household resources among that many children can lead to the low nutritional status. In addition, families with Data are the prevalence of each nutritional status according to mothers' characteristics classes The significance level was set at 0.05 for all the tests more children generally spend less time caring for each child [35]. Maternal characteristics did not exhibit enough variability in our study population.…”

Nutritional Status of Children (6-59 Months) from Food Secure and Food Insecure Households in Rural Communities of Saesie Tsaeda-Emba District, Tigray, North Ethiopia: Comparative Study

“…So, when family is headed by women themselves, children's nutritional status is better, even in a very poor household. On the other hand, the finding of this current study was in contrast with the finding of a study in Afar (18) which stated that children of female headed family were at higher risk to be malnourished.…”

“…This could be due to the reason that fathers who can read and write can be exposed and updated themselves to reading materials such as broachers, posters and other leaflets concerning about nutritional activities and infant and young child feeding practices; so, they can apply it to their children in order to make their children well nourished. This was also found to be consistent with finding of a study done in Afar (18). More notably, sex of the child was found to be determinant factor for underweight in which male children were 2.23 times and 78.9% at increased risk when compared to the female children in both the food secure and food insecure households respectively.…”

Magnitude and factors associated with malnutrition in children 6–59 months of age in Shinille Woreda, Ethiopian Somali regional state: a cross-sectional study

“…However, in accordance with the EDHS report [31] and earlier studies in Afar region [39] and northern part of Ethiopia [40] as well as in India [15], Bangladesh [16,25] and Uganda [27], the prevalence of stunting and underweight in the current study is low. On the other hand, the prevalence of wasting is high compared to the national report [31] and other similar studies [23,24,36,38,41,42].…”