An assessment of the causes of malnutrition in Ethiopia: A ...

water can have significant impact on malnutrition. Modest increments to a household’s
income are, however, unlikely to affect such access to the degree that public investment can.
Moreover, increases in income may have an immediate impact on income poverty yet
also take a generation or more to affect fully the consequences of poverty. School enrollment,
particularly the enrollment of girls, will almost certainly expand as incomes increase. This
will eventually lead to improved health and nutrition, but mainly when the current students
become parents. Similarly, as mentioned, an important lagged effect of malnutrition in young
girls is the influence this has on the birthweight of the children born to them later in life. This
lag also slows the response of nutrition to changes is current income and contrasts with the
potentially more rapid impact of improvements in nutritional knowledge. It is well known that
specific nutritional knowledge and understanding of child care has an important role in child
health. While schooling contributes to this knowledge, there is an equally important role of
specific programs to impart information relevant to improved health care. These programs are
not, however, an automatic and immediate consequence of increased income but reflect
investments in health systems, for which the government must take primary responsibility.
The SDPRP acknowledges the important of nutrition as a poverty issue in Ethiopia
but primarily as a matter of food security and relief (MOFED 2002, pp. 34, 36, & 66). From a
broader perspective, nutrition is a development issue, with high economic returns stemming
from investments in health and sanitation, in specific programs to convey knowledge about
child care, and in measures to improve food security. Much progress in reducing malnutrition
can be achieved if existing strategies, such as those regarding health extension and for
enhancing food security, achieve their objectives. However, strategies such as the health and
food security strategy have multifaceted objectives and given the multifaceted nature of
nutrition as outlined in the global framework discussed above, nutrition is often a secondary
priority within any sector strategy and does not feature among the regular responsibilities of
line ministries. Moreover, as many efforts to improve nutrition involve coordination at the
woreda and kebele level in order to communicate effectively with stakeholders and service
providers, there is much potential value in achieving harmonization of programs across
ministries. This is, indeed, among the goals of the national nutrition strategy.
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