Child Poverty Insights - January 2013 -Nutrition in Early Childhood: Insights from rural Ethiopia

Catherine Porter from the Department of Economics, University of Oxford, highlights recent findings on catching up from early nutritional deficits. Her findings are based on the Ethiopia Young Lives study of childhood poverty, which follows the same cohort of boys and girls born in 2001, from just after their birth.  Nutritional catch-up patterns vary substantially across socioeconomic groups in Ethiopia, even small improvements in living standards can increase a child’s chances of catching up from stunting or malnutrition in the early years.  The opportunity for influencing nutritional achievement is short; the window of opportunity to catch up appears to close as early as the age of five.