Modelling Mothers’ Socio-Economic and Demographic Determinants of Nutritional Health of Children Under Five in Kenya

Abstract

This study analyzes how socio economic and demographic factors in uence Nutritional status of Kenyan children aged 0-59 months. Since malnutrition is classi ed as a critical health problem in sub-saharan Africa, this study answers this question through a secondary data sample of 17911 children that were a representation of the whole population through strati ed random sampling method. To obtain the results, an ordinal logistic regression model is tted with Nutritional status of children being the response variable and the socio economic and demographic factors as the predictors. Weighting of the sample was done through the women individual sample. The results have shown that there is a signi cant relationship between the socio economic status of mothers and their children’s nutritional status. All the predictors are signi cant in explaining the response variable except for the mother’s age. The analysis of results is done using the odds ratio on the categories of the predictors with reference to other group. Mother’s aged between15-19 have a higher percentage (30%) of children who are stunted while those in the age bracet45-49 have a higher percentage of normal nourished children. Rift valley province is seen to be leading with the number of children that are stunted followed by Coast province. Mothers with no education are more likely to have stunting children than those that have at least some primary education. Wealth index is also seen to play a big role in the nutritional status of children with those from the poorest index being 46% more likely to either be wasted or stunted, and those from the richest family being 59% less likely to be wasted or stunted. A mother that does not watch television, listens to radio or read newspapers is 13% more likely to have stunted children compared to that who does. The Kenyan vision 2030 aims at achieving good health and adequate nutrition, the study therefore recommends for more studies to be done on the prevalence of obesity. Our main target as a country is to rich a statistical zero on malnutrition