Maternal Education and Child Development: Insights From Nutritional Status in Kenya

This paper examines the impacts of maternal education on her children's nutritional status in Kenya, utilizing six waves of nationally representative data from KDHS. To mitigate potential endogeneity issues and derive a causal relationship, we employ a change in the educational regime in 1985 as an instrument variable. The key findings can be summarized as follows. First, women under the new structure enhance their education by an average of 1.8 years. Second, an additional year of education attained by a mother is shown to have an impact on reducing the likelihood of her child experiencing stunting, underweight, and wasting by approximately 3.8, 2.6, and 1.2 percentage points, respectively. These findings withstand rigorous testing through a battery of robustness checks. Finally, to elucidate the underlying mechanisms behind these results, our study delves into various factors, encompassing women's fertility, female labor force engagement, women's information exposure, and their involvement in decision-making.