Child malnutrition in Ethiopia: Can maternal knowledge augment the role of income?

Nutritional status of children is a manifestation of a host of factors, including household access to food and the distribution of this food within the household, availability and utilization of health services, and the care provided to the child. While this has been sufficiently documented - by case studies and national official surveys - the reasons behind it are still poorly understood. The current study further explores the complementary role of nutritional knowledge using mothers' capability to correctly assess their children's nutritional status as a proxy for a community's nutritional knowledge. The study focuses on Ethiopia, a country that registers one of the highest child malnutrition rates in sub-Saharan Africa. The estimated results identify household resources, parental education, and food prices as key determinants of chronic child malnutrition in Ethiopia. Results further indicate that it is quite plausible that maternal nutritional knowledge, as proxied by the community's diagnostic capability of growth faltering, also plays an important role in the determination of child malnutrition.