Stagnating trends in complementary feeding practices in Bangladesh: An analysis of national surveys from 2004-2014.

Bangladesh has experienced steady socio-economic development. However, improvements in child growth have not kept pace. It is important to document complementary feeding (CF) practices-a key determinant of children's growth-and their trends over time. The study aims to examine trends in CF practices in children aged 6-23 months using data from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in 2004, 2007, 2011, and 2014. Multilevel logistic regression models were applied to identify independent predictors of four CF practice indicators among children 6-23 months, namely, timely introduction of complementary foods, minimum meal frequency, minimum dietary diversity, and minimum acceptable diet. Introduction of complementary foods was achieved among 64-71% of children between 2004 and 2014. The proportion meeting minimum meal frequency increased from 2004 to 2007 (71-81%) and declined and held steady at 65% from 2011 to 2014. The proportion meeting minimum dietary diversity in 2011 and 2014 was low (25% and 28%), and so was minimum acceptable diet (19% and 20%). From 2007 to 2014, child dietary diversity decreased and the most decline was in the consumption of legumes and nuts (29% to 8%), vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables (54% to 41%), and other fruits and vegetables (47% to 20%). Young child age (6-11 months), poor parental education, household poverty, and residence in the Chittagong and Sylhet independently predicted poorer feeding practices. Dietary diversity and overall diet in Bangladeshi children are strikingly poor. Stagnation or worsening of feeding practices in the past decade are concerning and call for decisive policy and programme action to address inappropriate child feeding practices

Maximizing Welfare in Social Networks under a Utility Driven Influence Diffusion Model

Motivated by applications such as viral marketing, the problem of influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in the literature. The goal is to select a small number of users to adopt an item such that it results in a large cascade of adoptions by others. Existing works have three key limitations. (1) They do not account for economic considerations of a user in buying/adopting items. (2) Most studies on multiple items focus on competition, with complementary items receiving limited attention. (3) For the network owner, maximizing social welfare is important to ensure customer loyalty, which is not addressed in prior work in the IM literature. In this paper, we address all three limitations and propose a novel model called UIC that combines utility-driven item adoption with influence propagation over networks. Focusing on the mutually complementary setting, we formulate the problem of social welfare maximization in this novel setting. We show that while the objective function is neither submodular nor supermodular, surprisingly a simple greedy allocation algorithm achieves a factor of $(1-1/e-\epsilon)$ of the optimum expected social welfare. We develop \textsf{bundleGRD}, a scalable version of this approximation algorithm, and demonstrate, with comprehensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets, that it significantly outperforms all baselines.Comment: 33 page

Impact of maternal and neonatal health initiatives on inequity in maternal health care utilization in Bangladesh

BackgroundDespite remarkable progress in maternal and child health, inequity persists in maternal care utilization in Bangladesh. Government of Bangladesh (GOB) with technical assistance from United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA), United Nation Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and World Health Organization (WHO) started implementing Maternal and Neonatal Health Initiatives in selected districts of Bangladesh (MNHIB) in 2007 with an aim to reduce inequity in healthcare utilization. This study examines the effect of MNHIB on inequity in maternal care utilization.MethodTwo surveys were carried out in four districts in Bangladesh- baseline in 2008 and end-line in 2013. The baseline survey collected data from 13,206 women giving birth in the preceding year and in end-line 7,177 women were interviewed. Inequity in maternal healthcare utilization was calculated pre and post-MNHIB using rich-to-poor ratio and concentration index.ResultsMean age of respondents were 23.9 and 24.6 years in 2008 and 2013 respectively. Utilization of pregnancy-related care increased for all socioeconomic strata between these two surveys. The concentration indices (CI) for various maternal health service utilization in 2013 were found to be lower than the indices in 2008. However, in comparison to contemporary BDHS data in nearby districts, MNHIB was successful in reducing inequity in receiving ANC from a trained provider (CI: 0.337 and 0.272), institutional delivery (CI: 0.435 in 2008 to 0.362 in 2013), and delivery by skilled personnel (CI: 0.396 and 0.370).ConclusionsOverall use of maternal health care services increased in post-MNHIB year compared to pre-MNHIB year and inequity in maternal service utilization declined for three indicators out of six considered in the paper. The reductions in CI values for select maternal care indicators imply that the program has been successful not only in improving utilization of maternal health services but also in lowering inequality of service utilization across socioeconomic groups. Maternal health programs, if properly designed and implemented, can improve access, partially overcoming the negative effects of socioeconomic disparities

Knowledge on AIDS among female adolescents in Bangladesh: Evidence from the Bangladesh demographic and health survey data

To assess the knowledge on acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) among female adolescents in Bangladesh, this study used data extracted from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 1996-1997. Of 1,446 ever-married women included in the study, most were currently married (96%), Muslims (92%) and from rural areas (91%). Only one in six adolescents had ever heard of AIDS. Of them, 57% reported AIDS as a fatal disease almost always, while only 22% believed that AIDS could be avoided. Multivariate analysis revealed that knowledge on AIDS was strongly and positively associated with education of female adolescents and their husbands and varied significantly across different parts of the country. Knowledge on AIDS was higher among relatively older and urban residents who had access to television or radio and whose husbands were using condom. Strong efforts are needed to improve awareness and to clarify misconceptions about AIDS. Improved access to education, mass-media, and promotion of condom use could prevent AIDS among female adolescents in Bangladesh

Testing for a Supply Constraint to Fertility: Interpreting the Up to God Response to the Survey Question on Desired Family Size

The paper outlines a methodology that allows us to determine whether couples. fertility is supply constrained based on the response they give to the subjective desired family size question. The central idea of the paper is that, when faced with the desired family size question, both constrained and unconstrained couples compare their demand for children with knowledge of their biological supply and unconstrained couples respond with a number while constrained couples respond with a qualitative response such as, "It is Up to God" (UTG), that essentially conveys the notion of demanding as many children as the supply function can yield. I then test this interpretation using data from Bangladesh. I find that controlling for demand side characteristics, positive supply shocks (birth of twins) lowers the probability of UTG response while negative supply shocks (wife's infertility) significantly raises the probability of UTG response. Based on the percentage of women giving the UTG response, it can be concluded that fertility of many couples in Bangladesh was constrained by supply.fertility, desired fertility, survey nonresponse Classification-JEL Code: J13, C25

Identifying Potential Factors of Childbearing in Bangladesh

This paper aims to identify different potential factors associated with childbearing pattern among the ever-married women in Bangladesh. Childbearing pattern is directly related to fertility level and rapid population growth is the major consequence of more childbearing. Bearing more children affects adversely on social and economic opportunities and produces substantial risks to the health of mothers and children. Bangladesh Demographic Health Survey data 1999-2000 and 2004 have been used for this study. First bi-variate analysis method is carried out to identify different factors associated with childbearing. Then generalized linear modelling approach has been performed to quantify the simultaneous effect of key socio-economic and demographic factors. Our primary findings show that childbearing varied tremendously by education level and age at first marriage. From the generalized linear model analysis, mother's age group, types of place of residence, division, media exposure are found to be significantly associated with bearing more children among the ever-married women in Bangladesh. These findings suggest that government should continue its effort to ensure higher education for females and to promote to delay age at marriage

Beyond Headcount: Measures that Reflect the Breadth and Components of Child Poverty

This paper presents a new approach to child poverty measurement that reflects the breadth and components of child poverty. The Alkire and Foster method presented in this paper seeks to answer the question ‘who is poor’ by considering the intensity of each child’s poverty. Once children are identified as poor, the measures aggregate information on poor children’s deprivations in a way that can be broken down to see where and how children are poor. The resulting measures go beyond the headcount by taking into account the breadth, depth or severity of dimensions of child poverty. The paper illustrates one way to apply this method to child poverty measurement, using Bangladeshi data from four rounds of the Demographic Health Survey covering the period 1997–2007. Results for Bangladesh show that the AF adjusted headcount ratio adds value because it produces a different ranking than the simple headcount, because it also reflects the simultaneous deprivations children experience (intensity). Given this, we argue that child poverty should not be assessed only according to the incidence of poverty but also by the intensity of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time. The Bangladesh example is used to illustrate how to compute and interpret the child poverty figures, how the final measure can be broken down by groups and by dimensions in order to analyse child poverty, how to interpret changes over time, and how to undertake robustness checks concerning the poverty cut-off.

Gender inequality in Bangladesh

"Although, there has been steady progress in reducing gender inequality in different sectors (education, health, employment etc.) there exists a huge inequality in these sectors of Bangladesh and participation of women is very low compared to their male counterpart. Gender inequality has appeared as the major stumbling barrier in achieving the development targets.

Factors Affecting Childhood Immunisation in Bangladesh

This study has examined the coverage of childhood immunisation and tried to identify the factors affecting the acceptance of immunisation practice among children in Bangladesh using the data from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 93-94. Results from multinomial logistic regression analysis indicate that education, occupation, household economic condition, mother’s age at birth, sex of child, mother’s TT immunisation acceptance, mother’s health facility visit, health worker’s visit to mothers, and contraceptive use are the independent variables that have statistically significant association with immunisation acceptance. The most important variable identified is the health worker’s visit to mothers.