Maternal education and child malnutrition in Cameroon: Does housing quality matter?

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate the role of housing quality on the relationship between maternal education and child malnutrition using the 2018 Cameroonian demographic and health survey. We employed the control function modelling and the non-self-cluster mean/proportion identification strategies to address potential endogeneity and sample selection concerns. Results indicate that: (a) women with less than ten years of schooling are more likely to have malnourished children than their counterparts with more years; (b) a percentage improvement in housing quality reduces the risk of a child being malnourished by about nine percentage points, and enhances the likelihood that mother's education will reduce child malnutrition; and (c) the mediation role of housing quality on the mother's education-child nutrition nexus is significant overall, but heterogeneous when we consider the different agroecological zones. These findings suggest the need for policy interventions on housing quality as a possible channel to enhance the direct effect of maternal education in reducing the probability of child malnutrition, and the potency of this channel would be increased if agroecological and cultural specificities are accounted for.

Keywords

• Housing quality
• Child malnutrition
• Maternal education