Child Height and Maternal Health Care Knowledge in Mozambique

TY - UNPB

T1 - Child Height and Maternal Health Care Knowledge in Mozambique

AU - Van Den Broeck, Katleen

PY - 2007

Y1 - 2007

N2 - Stunting prevalence rates in Mozambique are very high (41 percent), especially in rural areas (46 percent). Recent research shows that consumption growth alone will not be sufficient to solve the problem of malnutrition. To investigate the role of additional determinants I use a two-stage quantile regression approach with specific attention to the role of maternal preventive health care knowledge and schooling. Three different scores for health care knowledge are used and show similar results. For rural Mozambique, I find that maternal schooling has positive effects especially in the top quintile of the height-for-age distribution while health care knowledge has a positive effect on height-for-age of under two year old children especially at the lower end of the distribution where the severely stunted children are located. Improving health care knowledge of mothers could substitute for the low levels of education and community health care facilities in rural areas and positively affect the height of the most severely stunted children

AB - Stunting prevalence rates in Mozambique are very high (41 percent), especially in rural areas (46 percent). Recent research shows that consumption growth alone will not be sufficient to solve the problem of malnutrition. To investigate the role of additional determinants I use a two-stage quantile regression approach with specific attention to the role of maternal preventive health care knowledge and schooling. Three different scores for health care knowledge are used and show similar results. For rural Mozambique, I find that maternal schooling has positive effects especially in the top quintile of the height-for-age distribution while health care knowledge has a positive effect on height-for-age of under two year old children especially at the lower end of the distribution where the severely stunted children are located. Improving health care knowledge of mothers could substitute for the low levels of education and community health care facilities in rural areas and positively affect the height of the most severely stunted children

M3 - Working paper

BT - Child Height and Maternal Health Care Knowledge in Mozambique

PB - Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

ER -