Breastfeeding and Child Health in Uganda

Edward Bbaale

African Journal of Economic Review, 2016, vol. 04, issue 01

Abstract: The study sets out to estimate the effect of breastfeeding and health knowledge on child mortality and stunting. We used a nationally representative UDHS data of 2011 merged with the community section of the UNHS 2011 in order to bring on board community variables, such as distance to the health facility, that are potential instrumental variables. We employed various techniques; OLS, IV and control function during the analysis. We find that breastfeeding and health knowledge reduce child mortality but not child stunting irrespective of the analytical technique employed. Just as previous literature documents, the OLS estimate of the coefficient on breastfeeding and health knowledge is biased downwards compared to the IV and control function estimates. Government efforts towards sensitizing the masses about the importance of breastfeeding should be strengthened. Additionally, government needs to prioritize health knowledge impartation to women of reproductive age that are no longer in school. Additionally school curricular should be improved to include the impartation of health knowledge to students at an early stage of education in order to mitigate poor child health outcomes for the future generation.

Keywords: Health; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/264384/files/127201-345532-1-SM.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/264384/files/1 ... M.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:afjecr:264384

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.264384

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in African Journal of Economic Review from African Journal of Economic Review
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().