Urban household food insecurity and malnutrition in pediatric age: Evidences from the Luanda Divina Providencia Hospital.

Andrea Scimone Carbone^*

• World Food Programme, Rome, Italy

Food insecurity and poverty mechanisms intertwine and negatively affects the well-being of families and children, especially those with acute malnutrition. Analyzing primary and secondary data from the Divina Providencia Hospital of Luanda, this article Taking inspiration from the Amartya Sen capability approach for food insecurity assessments, this study combines analyses from an original household survey including data from 84 families and from hospital records from 1259 children. Firstly, the researchinvestigates aims to detect the socioeconomicfirst the deprivations related that influence to household food consumption. Secondly, it analyzes how anthropometry at hospital admission influence childrens’ ability to gain weight. Thirdly, it assesses how poverty and food insecurity influence outpatient treatment duration. and secondly the extent to which acute malnutrition is associated with the rate of hospitalization of hospitalized children. Adopting Classification and Regression Trees (CART) over several dependent variables, wWe find thatt lack of capabilities food consumption lowers when families cannot afford at least 2.5 meals per day, have a monthly income lower than 30.000 Kwanzas, and when the mother of the child have less than 9.5 years of schooling. Furtherly, we find that such as unsafe cooking methods, water inaccessibility, and low education undermine food and nutritional security while during hospitalization, anthropometry, and edema influence the rate of lethality of malnourished children. Better policy implementation is needed to overcome the intergenerational transmission of poverty and malnutrition.