Women Education and Empowerment: The Implications for Child Vaccination in Pakistan

The paper attempted to analyze the socioeconomic determinants of child vaccination in Pakistan particularly focusing on women education and empowerment. Micro-data having 3221 observations from Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2012-13 has been used in binary logistic regression. The woman (mother) education is taken as a categorical variable, i.e. primary, middle, secondary and higher to see that what level of education has influence on child vaccination. To capture the effect of woman empowerment on child vaccination two variables are included the analysis, i.e. woman decision-making index and woman violence index. The other explanatory variables are child's sex (household's attitude towards gender discrimination), birth-intervcd (fertility behavior), wealth index (socioeconomic status of the household), place of delivery and postnatcd-care (child and maternal health seeking behavior), woman's working status, household size and provincial residence of the household). The results have shown that woman education and empowerment (woman decision-making index and woman violence index) increase the probability of child vaccination in Pakistan. The primary level of woman education is also functioned to increase the likelihood of child vaccination. Higher the level of woman education, higher is the probability of child vaccination. The results demonstrate very! significant policy option for woman education and empowerment. The results further explain that birth-interval of the child, place of delivery, postnatal-care, wealth index enhance the probability of child vaccination while woman's working status and household size diminish the likelihood of child vaccination. In the provincial residence of the household, the children from the province of Sindh are less likely to have vaccination.