Staple Foods and Undernourished Children in Uganda
Location
Biology Building, Room 101
Start Date
30-11-2017 6:00 PM
End Date
30-11-2017 7:00 PM
Description
In 2011, the Government of Uganda implemented a 5-year Nutrition Action Plan focused primarily on reducing malnutrition among infants, young children, and women in their child-bearing years. The larger goal is to enhance the country’s future development by focusing on healthier children and new mothers today. An important yet untested tenet of the Plan is that a lack of dietary diversity, rather than a lack of food, is responsible for child malnutrition. Our work tests this tenet by analyzing a sample of 3,427 children aged 5 or younger drawn from a 3-year panel of the Uganda Living Standards Measurement Survey. Consistent with the Plan, we find that greater consumption of nutritionally deficient staple foods is strongly related to the likelihood of childhood stunting and wasting. Other findings are consistent with past research on child malnutrition. Still others show anomalies that should inform future research to better understand malnutrition in young children.
Staple Foods and Undernourished Children in Uganda
Biology Building, Room 101
In 2011, the Government of Uganda implemented a 5-year Nutrition Action Plan focused primarily on reducing malnutrition among infants, young children, and women in their child-bearing years. The larger goal is to enhance the country’s future development by focusing on healthier children and new mothers today. An important yet untested tenet of the Plan is that a lack of dietary diversity, rather than a lack of food, is responsible for child malnutrition. Our work tests this tenet by analyzing a sample of 3,427 children aged 5 or younger drawn from a 3-year panel of the Uganda Living Standards Measurement Survey. Consistent with the Plan, we find that greater consumption of nutritionally deficient staple foods is strongly related to the likelihood of childhood stunting and wasting. Other findings are consistent with past research on child malnutrition. Still others show anomalies that should inform future research to better understand malnutrition in young children.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Herrin is the Alexander R. Heron Professor of Economics and the director of the School of International Studies (SIS) at Pacific. He has been an Economics professor at Pacific since 1985, and the Director of SIS since January 2013. He teaches microeconomics, econometrics, and development economics. Following two Fulbright years at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, Dr. Herrin founded a partnership with the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) which includes summer internships for Pacific students and faculty research collaboration with Bureau staff, an example of which is presented today. His research to date has been at the intersections of housing economics, household migration, health economics, and development issues. Dr. Herrin received a BS in Business Administration and Economics from Wilkes University in Wilkes- Barre, Pennsylvania (1980), and a PhD (1986) in Economics from Binghamton University-State University of New York.