Can maternal education sustain or enhance the benefits of early life interventions? Evidence from the Young Lives Longitudinal Study

ABSTRACT

This paper provides evidence on the predicted benefits of maternal education, in terms of reduced child malnutrition at ages 1 and 5, focusing specifically on the complementarities with early life interventions across contexts. Using data from the Young Lives Longitudinal Study for Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, results show the expected association of maternal education with reduced likelihood of malnutrition both at ages 1 and 5. However, the benefits of maternal education via access to an early life intervention (antenatal care), are found only in some countries and for some levels of maternal education. Inequalities in the risk of malnutrition between those with the highest endowments of maternal education and access to antenatal services, and those without these, are significant within countries. We conclude that programmes which aim to reduce the risks of malnutrition should consider local knowledge and realities in order to understand more fully the expected benefits.

KEYWORDS:

• Maternal education
• child nutrition
• antenatal care
• Young Lives
• quantitative methods

Highlights

• We model complementarities of maternal education and antenatal care on child nutrition using data from the Young Lives Longitudinal study.

• Complementarities of maternal education and access to antenatal care are only found in some countries and for some levels of education.

• Still, inequalities in the risk of malnutrition for these complementarities are significant within countries.

• Programmes aimed at reducing the risks of malnutrition should consider local knowledge and realities.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Young Lives team for the data collection and UK Data Archive for making Young Lives dataset available for research purposes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Information presented here comes from different reports produces by Young Lives and available at http://www.younglives.org.uk/publications.

2. For simplicity, the paper refers to Ethiopia, Andhra Pradesh, Peru, and Vietnam. These relate to the areas of the Young Lives study.

3. The linearity assumption suggests that an additional year of education will have the same impact on the outcome of interest (in our case malnutrition) regardless of the level of education. Many authors have shown, however, that there are non-linear relations between education and social outcomes (Grossman 2006; Feinstein et al. 2006).

4. The term ‘four visits’ could consist of either the mother visiting an antenatal clinic, or a health visitor seeing the mother, or a combination of these.