Early Childhood Nutrition, Parental Growth Perceptions and Educational Aspirations in Rural Burkina Faso

Abstract

Early childhood nutrition can have long-term impacts on human capital outcomes. Besides direct biological effects, parents’ perceptions of exogenous nutrition shocksimpacts and their adjustments in subsequent investments, can amplify these direct effects on long-run outcomes. Understanding and anticipating parental perceptions and responses can improve the design of policies aimed at improving child nutrition. Using a randomised trial providing nutrition supplementation to children from 9 to 18 months old in Burkina Faso, we investigate how parental growth perceptions and educational aspirations respond to this positive shock when these children grow to 3–5 years old. We find that the intervention significantly increases parents rating their child’s physical and cognitive development as ‘Very good’. We find no significant impact on educational aspirations on average, but the intervention increases the probability that parents report that they would allow a girl to pursue post-secondary education by 13.4 percentage points (22.2%); if the household belongs to the poorest quantile in the sample, then this probability increases by 16.3 percentage points (37.2%). These heterogeneous effects suggest that early childhood nutrition interventions may stimulate complementary investments in human capital by parents that could amplify the direct effects and further enable disadvantaged children to catch up.

Acknowledgements

The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of the supporting organisations. We thank Michael Carter for his guidance and support. We thank the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (IRSS) in Burkina Faso, and its Director, Jean Bosco Ouedraogo, for leadership and support in the context of management of the iLiNS-Zinc project, within which the data for this work were collected. Special thanks go to the large and efficient data collection team in the field in Bama, Burkina Faso. Rosemonde Guissou was instrumental in study design and implementation—without her very significant efforts, this project could not have been done. General thanks go to the iLiNS Project, especially to Kathryn Dewey, Mary Arimond, Sonja Hess, Jerome Some, Souheila Abbeddou, and Kenneth H. Brown who provided guidance and support, and to Ellen Piwoz of the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation who provided the same. We also acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions provided by participants in seminar and workshop presentations at UC Davis. Special thanks go to Pierre Mérel, Shea Antrim, Katie Adams and Eliana Zebllos. An anonymous reviewer provided comments and suggestions that were very helpful in revising the original manuscript. All errors are those of the authors alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

Data is available upon requests.

Notes

1. Linnemayr and Alderman (2011) also examine nutritional supplementation for pregnant women and 0 to 3-year-old children in Senegal and find that supplementation has a significant effect on the development outcomes of toddlers only if it is taken during mothers’ pregnancy.

2. Our study differs from most of the existing research in the previous paragraph on parental responses to exogenous changes mentioned in early childhood circumstances in that we do not investigate the impacts on siblings of the program children, as we do not have data on the siblings. We are aware that the terms of reinforce and compensate come from previous studies looking at families with multiple children, and a main component of parents’ preferences they consider is inequity aversion versus the desire to maximise the total productivity of the offspring. However, in this paper, we borrow the terms, and instead consider the trade-off between the program child’s human capital and parent’s own consumption and/or other investments.

3. These short elicitation questions were added to an add-on project of the nutrition trial, which was a lab-in-the-field experiment studying intra-household cooperation between spouses.

4. The nutrition supplementation was provided to the households in the sub-sample used in the current chapter from June 2010 to November 2011.

5. Similar imbalance also exists in the full sample of the Burkina iLiNS project.

6. We tried using four treatment status dummies instead of one, and we also found no significantly different treatment effects among the different treatment arms.

7. There is no significant difference in mothers’ and fathers’ ratings in our regression.

8. The likelihood of greater than 14 years for control poor (i.e., poorest 10%), treated poor, control non-poor (i.e., richest 90%) and treated non-poor are 52.4 per cent (with standard error 0.059), 67 per cent (0.035), 68.3 per cent (0.048) and 67.5 per cent (0.027), respectively.

9. We tried including these two perceptions variables non-linearly as well, but most of time adding the quadratic simply makes the coefficients on the perception variables insignificant.

10. However, we do not find a significant correlation between the objective measures of child-growth either 18 months or 9 months of age, and the asset index variable. This is a bit puzzling if, as argued here, relatively wealthier parents with more resources also have stronger preferences for child growth. The explanation may have something to do with the fact that even these relatively wealthier households in our sample face serious constraints and are therefore largely unable to translate their slightly larger asset base into real growth outcomes.

11. We also have data on Weight-for-Height Z-scores for our sample, but we find no significant treatment effect in the WHZ scores either on average or for the poor and non-poor halves separately.

12. The number of observations varies for different variables, ranging from 308 to 3,038, due to the fact that some of the variables were collected from all households participating in the broader iLiNS study while some were only collected of a random subset of these households. Missing data with some variables introduces another layer of variation in these samples sizes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; William and Flora Hewlett Foundation [IIE Dissertation Fellowship]; BASIS Innovation Lab.