Determinants of nutrition status of children under 5 years in Uganda

Abstract

Nutritional status of children is one of the major predictors of child survival. However, malnutrition is a major public health problem in most of the developing countries like Uganda and occurs prominently among under-five children. Malnutrition at the early stages of life can increase risk infections, morbidity, and mortality together with decreased mental and cognitive development. The main objective of this study was to assess the determinants of the nutrition status of children less than five years in Uganda. The study used secondary data from UDHS 2016 birth records file dataset (n=4,444) where the anthropometric indices were considered to measure BMI and analyzed using STATA v12. The results showed that 48.59 per cent of the children were stunted, 47.48 per cent obese, 2.05 per cent and 1.89 per cent normal and wasted respectively. Majority of the children were male (50.41 per cent) compared to female (49.59 per cent). The Bivariate analysis showed that Obesity was higher among male children (53.22 per cent) than among female children. Stunting among children decreased with increasing wealth quantiles that is from 31.26 per cent from poorest to 14.22 per cent from the richest quantile. Among the child factors, the nutritional status of children’s (stunting, wasting, obese) found to be influenced by age and sex, Maternal factors like maternal Education and economic factors wealth status was associated with children’s nutrition status. Furthermore, the prevalence of stunting decreases with increasing levels of mothers’ education. Stunting was majorly (82.91 per cent) reported among children in rural areas than urban areas. Therefore, a lot of emphasis in terms of resources and intervention programs should be put in place to improve the Nutritional status of children under five in rural areas.