Author(s)

Loic Molambo Sambi^1*, Francis Menjo Baye²

¹University of Bangui, Bangui, Central African Republic.
²University of Yaoundé II, Yaounde, Cameroon.

This paper investigates the effect of fertility on child health status, using data from the sixth edition of the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS6) of the Central African Republic (CAR) collected in 2018 by the government’s statistics office. Specifically, the paper seeks: to assess the direct and indirect effects of maternal fertility on child health. To achieve these objectives, we use a framework based on the quantity-quality theory of the new household economy and the control function modeling strategy—which simultaneously corrects for endogeneity, sample selectivity and unobserved heterogeneity biases. Results show that, having an additional child significantly increases the risk of sickness in children under 5 years in CAR. Results also show a positive and highly significant indirect effect of fertility on sickness as depicted by the interaction of fertility and its residual—a clear indication of undesirable complementarities between fertility and unobserved correlates of fertility in widening sickness probability among children. These findings suggest that public intervention that improves spending on social services, such as education, preventive child health and family planning programmes, would reduce fertility, and initiate the process of better child health and productivity in adulthood.

Maternal Fertility, Child Health, Control Function Modeling, MICS, CAR

Sambi, L. and Baye, F. (2022) Responsiveness of Child Health to Maternal Fertility in Central African Republic. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 10, 401-417. doi: 10.4236/jss.2022.1010026.