The Effect of Mother’s Education on Child Health: Evidence from a CCT program in Bangladesh

Under-five malnutrition is one of the biggest healthcare challenges the world currently faces. According to WHO, in 2016 there were 155 million under-five children stunted and 52 million wasted. In Bangladesh, a South-Asian country, more than 54 percent of preschool-age children are stunted and more than 17 percent are wasted. A child is considered stunted if his/her height for age is more than two standard deviations below the WHO Child Growth Standard Median, wasted when the weight for height is less than two standard deviations below the standard median and underweight when the weight for age is less than two standard deviations below the standard median. Both stunting and wasting indicate poor nutrition and/or repeated infections. Stunting is associated with poor cognition, poor educational performance, low wage, and productivity while wasting may lead to an increased risk of death.

This paper seeks to find the causal effect of mother’s education on child health, namely, under 5 stunting, wasting and incidence of being underweight, exploiting the introduction of a school stipend program for rural girls in Bangladesh (Female Secondary-School Stipend Program: FSSSP). To solve the endogeneity problem in the relationship between mother’s education and child health, the paper uses mother’s years of eligibility to the stipend program as an instrument for her years of education. I find that one extra year of mother’s education leads to 3.5 percentage point (8 percent) decrease in the incidence of stunting and 2.3 percentage point (5.57 percent) decrease in the incidence of being underweight for the child. One more year of mother’s education also leads to 11.3 and 9.4 percent increase in height for age and weight for age standard deviation from a reference median respectively. A difference in difference analysis shows that one more year of mother’s eligibility to the program decreases the probability of her child being stunted and being underweight by 3 percent and 2 percent respectively.

This paper advances the literature in three ways. First, it estimates the effect of mother’ education on under-five child health by looking at its effect on a novel set of outcomes: stunting, wasting and incidence of being underweight. While there have been a number of studies estimating the causal effect of parent’s education on birth-weight, infant mortality, age of marriage or pregnancy and Fertility, to my knowledge there has been none estimating the effect of mother’s education on under 5 child health, namely stunting, wasting and incidence of being underweight. Second, it is the first to provide credible causal estimates of the effect of mother’s education on under-five child health in a country with a very low level of female education and a high level of under-five child malnutrition. The third and final contribution of the paper is that it is the first evaluation of the inter-generational effect of FSSSP, one of the earliest and longest-running conditional cash transfer programs in the world.