Most of Africa's Nutritionally Vulnerable Women and Children Are Not Found in Poor Households
Creator
Brown, Caitlin
Ravallion, Martin
van de Walle, Dominique
Abstract
Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. We question this assumption. Our comprehensive assessment for Sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and children are spread quite widely across the distribution of household wealth and consumption. While the expected positive household wealth effects on individual nutritional status are evident, roughly three-quarters of underweight women and under-nourished children are not found in the poorest 20% of households, and around half are not found in the poorest 40%. The mean joint probability of being an underweight woman and living in the poorest wealth quintile is only 0.03. Countries with higher overall rates of undernutrition tend to have a higher share of undernourished individuals in non-poor households. The results are consistent with existing evidence of substantial intra-household inequality in nutritional attainments.
Permanent Link
http://hdl.handle.net/10822/1043497Date Published
2017Rights
All rights reserved by the author. Please contact gui2de@georgetown.edu for information about permissions.
Subject
Type
Publisher
Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation
Collections
Metadata
Show full item recordRelated items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Societal Effects of Overlooking Children -- Our Most Vulnerable Population
Johnson, Linda (1999-06)