Beyond the mother-child dyad : three studies on the role of "others" in improving child wellbeing in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of three empirical chapters contributing to our understanding of how individuals other than the mother can improve child health and survival. For these studies, I employ Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data on Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Overall, I find that individuals and/or factors at different levels of analysis (i.e., both at the micro- and at the meso-/macro-level) can contribute substantially to children’s wellbeing and survival. The first study shows that women’s community education is negatively associated with both infant and child mortality in several SSA countries, and countries’ human development does not moderate this relationship. The second study investigates the role played by different-lineage grandmothers on children’s nutritional status in selected SSA countries, further exploring how societal patriarchal orientation moderates this relationship. I find that, differently from other contexts, children who co-reside with paternal grandmothers are less likely to be stunted, in comparison with children co-residing with maternal grandmothers, and that societal patriarchal orientation does not explain this SSA peculiarity. Rather, this difference is explained by the fact that children who co-reside with maternal grandmothers are typically fatherless children and, that, as such, are negatively selected. The third study explores the relationship between parental educational dissimilarity and under-five mortality in SSA, employing Diagonal Reference Models, a more suitable methodological tool than the ones previously employed in the literature on the matter. Findings reveal substantively weak associations between both hypergamy and hypogamy (relatively to homogamy) and under-five mortality, with little cross-country heterogeneity. This suggests that maternal education influences child survival via different pathways than by influencing the mother’s position in the household. Overall, these results provide novel evidence on how and to what extent individuals other than the mother, among which other members of the community and other family members, can impact children’s survival in SSA.