Long-Term Impact of Malnutrition on Education Outcomes for Children in Rural Tanzania

Lucia Luzi, Boston University

This paper investigates the long-term impact of early childhood malnutrition, in children living in a rural area of Tanzania, on their subsequent educational achievements as young adults. The data used are of an exclusive long term panel data set collected in the Kagera Health and Development Survey. Infants born in the early nineties were traced and interviewed in 2004. Any attrition due to household or environmental characteristics is removed by differencing among siblings. Additionally, a broad investigation on the weather conditions that prevailed during infancy is conducted, in order to attain the Instrument Variable to face the existing endogeneity proper of the health variable. Estimation results from the analysis show that improving the Tanzanian child’s health status would result in an additional 28% probability of completing primary education. This result emerges when the two districts of Kagera are excluded from the analysis.