Browsing by Author "Shewangizaw, Nahom"

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    Women Empowerment and Children Health Outcomes in Ethiopia
    (Addis Ababa University, 2021-09) Shewangizaw, Nahom; Terfa, Zelalem (PhD)
    This study aims to assess the association between women's empowerment and children's health outcomes and the interplay among other socio-economic variables by using the 2016 Ethiopian Demography and Health Survey empirically. Children's health outcomes are measured using stunting and acute respiratory infection, while the women’s empowerment index is constructed using the survey-based women empowerment index from three dimensions: decision making, domestic violence, and social independence, and to assess their interplay, other socio-economic variables such as access to electricity, type of fuel used for cooking, type of toilet facility used, source of drinking water, place of residence, wealth level of the household, and sex of the child are used. For empirical analysis two logit models are constructed corresponding to both health outcomes. The study showed that except for the decision-making dimension, the social independence, and domestic violence dimensions have a significant association with both stunting and ARI, which leads to a significant decrement in exposure to stunting and acute respiratory infection. This is due to empowered women is financially secured, and independent to influence her inter-household dynamics. In the same way, the interplay between women empowerment, children's health outcomes, and socio-economic variables also resulted in a varying result. Also, rural residents, households without toilet facilities, drinking water from unprotected sources are more likely to be stunted. In that fashion, children from households with no electricity, and traditional cooking fuel are more likely to be exposed to acute respiratory infection. Thus, gender-based policies are expected to increase women’s access to education, even by expanding basic adult education, information, technology, employment, financial independence, social protection, creating access to infrastructure to smoothen women's burden, where this, in turn, will improve children health outcomes