Factors Associated With Malnutrition among Children below Five Years in Uganda: Case of Tooro Region, Western Uganda

Abstract

With various studies that have tried to examine factors associated with malnutrition among children, most of them stopped only at bivariate analysis thus not showing the overall combined effect of the potential factors using a model. Therefore, the researcher focused on using a binary logistic model to evaluate The study focused on examining the factors associated with malnutrition among children below 5 years in Tooro region and factors like household income, maternal education and sex of the child were considered. The study made use of secondary data that was obtained from UBOS and Only 433 observations were considered. The objectives of this study were;to find out the effect of household income on the nutrition status of a child, to determine the influence of maternal education on a child’s nutritional status and to find out the relationship between a child’s sex and nutritional status. The analysis was done using STATA using the binary logistic regression tools were used. At univariate level, majority of the women (67.62%) completed primary, majority (51.32%) of the children aged 5 years and below in Tooro region were males and the highest category of household income was for the middle income earners (33.4%). At bivariate level, the results indicated that household income and nutritional status of children were significantly related (p<0.05) while maternal education and sex of the child had no significant relationship with the nutritional status of children (p>0.05). Therefore, at that level, one of the hypotheses was rejected, implying that there was a significant relationship between the nutritional status of children and one explanatory variable; household income. Under the multiple regression analysis, household income as a significant variable at bivariate level was considered but also the other two factors which are insignificant that is; maternal education and sex of the child were also considered since they are very important determinants of the nutritional status of children. In this case, household income and maternal education emerged significant (p<0.05) while sex of the child remained insignificant (p>0.05). The study therefore recommended that household heads and other members of the household should incur extra efforts to increase household income and that the government should carry out sensitization and offer more support to enhance women education.