Revista de prevención y atención de la salud

Abstracto

Inseguridad alimentaria y absentismo escolar entre los niños rurales

Ashekur Rahman Mullick

This study aimed to assess the extent to which food insecurity affects school absenteeism among rural school-going children. A school-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 460 rural school-going children (grades 4–10) in Saltha upaziila of Faridpur district, Bangladesh from January to December 2019. Children who gave assent after obtaining parental consent were included as study participants. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data on food insecurity and socio-demographic variables. To further examine the paths from food insecurity to absenteeism through child labour activities, recursive path analysis was used where activities were regressed on child food insecurity using linear regression and absenteeism was regressed on child food insecurity and labour activities using binary logistic regression using odds ratio and 95% confidence intervals. The significance level was set at 0.05. Among the participants, about 53.7% were female and in 52.7% of the cases the father of the participants was a farmer and his mean income was 98208.18 ± 13618.196 Taka per year. The findings from the binary logistic regression analysis also showed that food insecurity was positively associated with helping parents do household shopping, cooking, caring for siblings, participating in school sports and watching television during leisure time. However, helping parents in the field to grow food and taking nap at night were negatively associated with food insecurity. The findings of this study showed that the frequency of adolescent school absenteeism was significantly high (39.6%) among the moderately food insecure groups (P < 0.001). Participants' age (p=0.000), participants' educational level (p=0.00), household head (p=0.017), housing type (p=0.000), parental occupation (p=0.0145), and household economic level (p=0.000) were significantly associated with food insecurity status. Therefore, national policies and programs should emphasize on how to improve household income, earning capacity, housing conditions, and educational level by introducing different types of opportunities and socioeconomic status to address food insecurity, which is a key driver of school absenteeism.