Fertility Intentions, Child Growth and Nutrition in Northern Malawi.

Although there is wide agreement that the promotion of family planning lowers fertility, it is not clear to what extent greater contraceptive use and smaller family sizes will enhance investment in human capital and economic growth or what are the consequences of unwanted or unintended childbearing on children’s life chances.
We inform this debate by analyzing data on fertility intentions and children’s anthropometric measures collected as part of an on-going Demographic Surveillance Site (DSS) in Karonga District in Northern Malawi. We applied Propensity Score Matching to assess the effect of ‘unintendedness’ on child growth.
This study analyzes the effect of prospective fertility intentions on the nutritional status of the index child and the siblings of the index child after one and two years using both data on retrospective and prospective fertility intentions.