This Technical Paper uses all available data collected on the malnutrition of children in 20 countries for Demographic and Health Surveys. The paper thus presents an exhaustive analysis of the factors of malnutrition in Africa, following a standard approach where the health indicator of the child, in this case height, depends on exogenous variables, i.e. characteristics of the child, the parents, the environment and parents’ property income.

The econometric tests confirm the effects of certain variables used in preceding studies. Above all, these tests present new results by introducing variables which had not previously been taken into account, such as the presence of a twin, breastfeeding, family situation and access of the mother to news and information sources. We find that access to the media always has a positive effect on child health, whereas polygamy has the opposite effect. The effects of infrastructure had scarcely been considered previously whereas, in this wide-ranging ...