Abstract:
This study examines the effect of maternal education on childhood morbidity and under-five mortalities in Nigeria using the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS), 2013. Empirically, the study employs instrumental variable probit regression (Ivprobit) model to investigate the relationship between maternal education and child health outcomes while the multinomial logit model was estimated to test the disaggregated effect of maternal education on the varying rate of under-five mortality across the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria. The study used data at the individual level, with a total of 18, 563 observations to test the model on under-five mortality while the model on childhood morbidity and disaggregated effect of maternal education was tested at the household level with a total of 16,536 observations. The result showed that maternal education has a significantly negative relationship with under-five mortality but not with childhood morbidity. The result from the multinomial logit regression shows that mother’s level of education and wealth status exert more significant effect on regional disparity in under-five mortality in Nigeria more than religion or belief system. Intuitively, maternal education can only be effective in improving child health outcomes if such education can potentially impact positively on other socio-economic variables that determine child health outcomes especially wealth index, poor childcare attitude and obnoxious belief systems. The study concludes that policy interventions by government to address child health vulnerability and inequality in Nigeria through maternal education should coherently improve the socio-economic characteristics of would-be mothers for it to be effective.
