Shared residual risk of childhood undernutrition indicators in Malawi. An application of shared spatial component model

Abstract

Many studies have looked at the residual risk of the specific child undenutrition indicators. This study aimed at mapping the shared risk of two of the undernutrition indicators. The shared spatial component model was fitted to two of the child undernutrition indicators using 5066 child records of the 2015 Malawi demographic health survey data. The spatial components were modelled by the convolution prior, with the structured components being assigned the conditional autoregressive distribution. The southern region is at the greatest risk of having stunting and wasting, wasting and underweight, as compared to the central and northern region. The shared risk of stunting and underweight is randomly distributed. Interventions to reduce the shared risk of child undernutrition should focus on the southern region and a little bit in the central region, and attention should be on addressing the issue of overpopulation and effects of climate change.