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The study used data from Demographic and Health Surveys for 30 Sub-Saharan African countries to investigate differences in the residential effects of mothers' education on stunting. Multilevel logistic regressions were employed to examine the neighbourhood effects of mothers' education on stunting. The study found that although a higher proportion of mothers with secondary education in a neighbourhood, irrespective of the residence type (rural or urban), reduces a child's probability of being stunted, this effect is stronger for children residing in rural areas than those in the urban. Achieving a target of at least 75 per cent of mothers obtaining secondary education and higher will bridge the rural-urban gap in stunting in Sub-Saharan Africa. • There is significant spatial inequality in stunting across sub-Saharan Africa • Neighbourhood Mothers' secondary education reduce a child's stunting risk • Mothers' education is more impactful on stunting in rural areas than urban • A 75% maternal secondary education target will bridge rural-urban stunting gaps [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This study investigates whether mother’s empowerment measured by her education attainment relative to father’s, domestic violence, and autonomy is related to children’s nutritional status using the three rounds of NFHS data in India. First, mother’s relative education is associated with better nutritional status of children in the short run. Second, the quantile regression results show strong associations between women’s empowerment and better nutritional status of children in the long run at the low end of its conditional distribution. Finally, the relation between access to health schemes and better nutritional measures of children. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: The objective of the present study is to examine whether household access to microfinance reduces poverty. Using national household data from India, treatment effects model is employed to estimate the poverty-reducing effects of Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) loans for productive purposes, such as investment in agriculture or non-farm businesses on household poverty levels. These models take into account the endogenous binary treatment effects and sample selection bias associated with access to MFIs. Despite some limitations, such as those arising from potential unobservable important determinants of access to MFIs, significant positive effect of MFI productive loans on multidimensional welfare indicator has been confirmed. The significance of “treatment effects” coefficients has been verified by both Tobit and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) models. In addition, we found that loans for productive purposes were more important for poverty reduction in rural than in urban areas. However in urban areas, simple access to MFIs has larger average poverty-reducing effects than the access to loans from MFIs for productive purposes. This leads to exploring service delivery opportunities that provide an additional avenue to monitor the usage of loans to enhance the outreach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: We test the hypothesis that microfinance reduces poverty at the macro level using cross-country and panel data which are constructed by the Microfinance Information Exchange data on Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) and the World Bank data. Taking account of the endogeneity associated with MFIs’ loans, we show that a country with higher MFIs’ gross loan portfolio per capita tends to have lower levels of poverty indices. Contrary to recent micro evidence, our results suggest that microfinance significantly reduces poverty at macro level and thus reinforce the case for channeling funds from development finance institutions and governments of developing countries into MFIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]