Causal Effect of Parental Schooling on Early Childhood Undernutrition: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Zimbabwe

An estimated 3.1 million children die each year because of undernutrition. Although cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have found a protective association between greater parental education and undernutrition in their children, no randomized trial has identified a causal effect, to our knowledge. Using the 1980 education reform in Zimbabwe as a natural experiment, we estimated the causal effect of additional parental schooling on the probability of anthropometric failure in their children under 5 years of age (ages 3 through 59 months). Analyzing data on 8,243 children from the 1988, 1999, 2005-2006, and 2010-2011 Demographic and Health Surveys, we found no effect of parental schooling on early childhood undernutrition at the national level in Zimbabwe. Among households in the urban and high-wealth-index subsamples, each additional year of maternal schooling led to absolute reductions in the probability of a child's being wasted of 5.2 percentage points (95% confidence interval (CI): -9.3, -1.2) and 3.6 percentage points (95% CI: -6.9, -0.4), respectively. In the subsample of children between the ages of 3 and 23 months, each additional year of paternal schooling increased the probability of a child's being stunted by 9.6 percentage points (95% CI: 1.4, 17.9). Secondary schooling alone may not be enough to improve early childhood nutrition in low-resource settings.