Contemporaneous Household Economic Well-being Response to Preschool Children Health Status in Cameroon

Abstract

This paper estimates the contemporaneous response of household economic well-being to child health status and examines gender disparities in the response process, while controlling for other correlates. The paper uses the 2001 Cameroon household consumption survey and a range of survey-based regressions to generate results. Child health (weight-given age) correlates positively and significantly with household economic well-being, surrogated by log of household total expenditures per adult. This suggests evidence of spill-over effects of child health on household production. The effect of child health on well-being in households headed by women is more than that of their male counterparts. This indicates that with better child health, female heads are likely to exploit the resulting extra-time, budgetary savings and peace of mind at work to increase household well-being more effectively than their male counterparts. These results have implications for public interventions that promote child-day-care/pre-nursery school centres as an important enabler for women to use the extra-time at their disposal to participate additionally in labour market/training opportunities. Investing in reproductive health, especially child health, given the right conditions, can engender income growth, reduce poverty and initiate the process of accumulation of human capabilities.

Keywords: Child health, Economic well-being, Household survey data, Cameroon