栄養と食品科学ジャーナル
オープンアクセス

概要

How Does Governance Impact Malnutrition? A Close Look at Factors Associated with Underweight in Children Under 5 Years in Ghana

George Woode*, Regina Birner

Undernutrition remains a barrier to achieving the sustainable development goals in most developing countries. The United Nations identified that, the right mix of policies and actions that, addresses the numerous, interrelated causes of hunger and undernutrition will be able to achieve Zero Hunger thereby ending hunger and undernutrition. In Ghana, 11% of all children under the age of 5 years are underweight. Nutrition programs are traditionally funded through the government of Ghana budgetary allocations, to pay salaries and for the supply of logistics, and training. The objective of the study was to evaluate the effect of human resource capacity and budgetary expenditure on nutrition program outcomes for children less than five years using in depth interviews, anthropometric data on age and weight and data on nutrition human resource and expenditure in three regions from 2014 to 2017 in Ghana. The paper finds using linear mixed effects modelling that human and financial resources are not significant predictors of underweight besides, there are externalities in the implementation of nutrition programs for children under 5 years due to poor targeting and information asymmetries, resulting in excludability in consumption of nutrition services, therefore nutrition programs may not be well coordinated, and implemented pointing to government failure. Mother support groups contributed in reducing under nutrition in children less than 5 years through the cultivation and consumption of nutrition sensitive agriculture value chain products. This paper concludes that the allocation of resources for program implementation alone without local governance within the social cultural context will not result in adequate care and feeding practices to engineer a change in prevalence of underweight in children less than 5 years.