Staple Foods and Undernourished Children in Uganda

In 2011, the Government of Uganda implemented a 5-year Nutrition Action Plan focused primarily on reducing malnutrition among infants, young children, and women in their child-bearing years. The larger goal is to enhance the country’s future development by focusing on healthier children and new mothers today. An important yet untested tenet of the Plan is that a lack of dietary diversity, rather than a lack of food, is responsible for child malnutrition. Our work tests this tenet by analyzing a sample of 3,427 children aged 5 or younger drawn from a 3-year panel of the Uganda Living Standards Measurement Survey. Consistent with the Plan, we find that greater consumption of nutritionally deficient staple foods is strongly related to the likelihood of childhood stunting and wasting. Other findings are consistent with past research on child malnutrition. Still others show anomalies that should inform future research to better understand malnutrition in young children