Abstract
Child malnutrition is the main cause of illness, a range of cognitive and physical growth deficiencies, and the death of millions of children, especially in developing regions such as sub-Saharan Africa. To address this major health concern, we employed publicly available geolocated data from 2015 Demographic and Health Surveys and spatial analysis methods to identify the distribution of malnutrition in the children under 5 in Zimbabwe and to explore the associations between some household characteristics, environmental variabilities and malnutrition. In Zimbabwe, 27% of children were short for their age or stunted. Analysis of spatial dependency indicates that the distribution of malnutrition is clustered. The highest numbers of malnourishment were identified in the northeast of the country, which are in the Mashonaland Central and East provinces. The associations between malnutrition and proximity to the protected areas, travel time to the cities, rainfall, and household wealth index, were examined. Our findings indicate that the associations between environmental variables and malnutrition were inconsistent across the country. Results of this study provide an understanding of factors affecting child malnutrition and consequently will have policy implications in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals including the goal of zero hunger and ending all forms of malnutrition.
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Data availability
The datasets used for this study, the ‘2015 Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey’, were obtained from The DHS program (www.dhsprogram.com). According to the ‘Dataset Terms of Use’ we do not have permission to share this data (https://dhsprogram.com/data/Access-Instructions.cfm). The registered user of the website (www.dhsprogram.com), can download the survey and GPS datasets. We obtained the GIS boundary files of Zimbabwe from the Center for Humanitarian Data (https://data.humdata.org/dataset/zimbabwe-administrative-levels-0-3-boundaries).
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We thank Dr. J. Aaron Hipp for his feedback on earlier version of this work.
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ZJ Conceptualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing—Original Draft, Writing—Review & Editing. SN Conceptualization, Review & Editing, Supervision. YFL Conceptualization, Review & Editing, Supervision. All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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This study used data collected by Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). According to DHS, “the procedures and questionnaires for standard DHS surveys have been reviewed and approved by ICF Institutional Review Board (IRB). Additionally, country-specific DHS survey protocols are reviewed by the ICF IRB and typically by an IRB in the host country”. More information about DHS data “ethical review”, “Informed and Voluntary Participation”, and “Privacy and Confidentiality during Data Collection and Data Processing” can be found here: https://dhsprogram.com/Methodology/Protecting-the-Privacy-of-DHS-Survey-Respondents.cfm.
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Jouzi, Z., Nelson, S.A.C. & Leung, YF. Spatial heterogeneity of child malnutrition, proximity to protected areas and environmental variabilities in Zimbabwe. GeoJournal 88, 3773–3789 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-023-10842-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-023-10842-5