Maternal Education and Child Nutritional Status: Do Family and Community Matter? The Case of Ethiopia

Tesfayi Gebreselassie, Pennsylvania State University

Studies regarding the relationship between mother's education and child nutritional status in sub-Saharan Africa have reported mixed results. Some report the lack of a significant relationship. A few report weakly significant relationship, while others report strong and significant effect of mother's education. The goal of this paper is to examine the influence of maternal education and investigate the effect of community level variables on child nutrition. Classical regression techniques and multilevel analysis are used to analyze the data. The main results of this study indicate that child age, child illness, parental education, household income, distance to primary school and population density are strong predictors of child nutritional status in Ethiopia. Nonetheless, the strong positive effect of mother's education on child height appears to be limited to post-primary level of education. The results from multilevel analysis indicate that presence of unobserved heterogeneity across families and across communities. The intra-community correlation is high.