Climate variability, armed conflicts and child malnutrition in sub-saharan Africa: A spatial analysis in Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria.

Background: Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has one of the highest prevalence of malnutrition among children under 5 in the world. It is also the region most vulnerable to the adverse effect of climate change, and the one that records the most armed conflicts. The chains of causality suggested in the literature on the relationship between climate change, armed conflict, and malnutrition have rarely been supported by empirical evidence for SSA countries. Methods: This study proposes to highlight, under the hypothesis of spatial non-stationarity, the influence of climatic variations and armed conflicts on malnutrition in children under 5 in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria. To do this, we use spatial analysis on data from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), Uppsala Conflict Data Program Georeferenced Event Dataset (UCDP GED), Climate Hazards center InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). Results: The results show that there is a spatial autocorrelation of malnutrition measured by the prevalence of underweight children in the three countries. Also, local geographically weighted analysis shows that armed conflict, temperature and rainfall are positively associated with the prevalence of underweight children in localities of Somali in Ethiopia, Mandera and Turkana of Wajir in Kenya, Borno and Yobe in Nigeria. Conclusion: In conclusion, the results of our spatial analysis support the implementation of conflict-sensitive climate change adaptation strategies.

Environmental factors and childhood Fever in areas of the Ouagadougou Health and Demographic Surveillance System, Burkina Faso.

Using data on 825 under-5 children from the Ouagadougou Health and Demographic Surveillance System collected in 2010, this article examines the effects of aspects of the immediate environment on childhood fever. Logit regression models were estimated to assess the effects of the quality of the local environment on the probability that a child is reported to have had a fever in the two weeks preceding the survey, after controlling for various demographic and socioeconomic variables. While the estimated impact of some environmental factors persisted in the full models, the effects of variables such as access to water and type of household waste management decreased in the presence of demographic, socioeconomic and neighbourhood factors. The management of waste water was found to significantly affect the occurrence of childhood fever. Overall, the results of the study call for more efforts to promote access to tap water to households at prices that are affordable for the local population, where the threats to child health appears to be greatest.