Derek Headey, John Hoddinott, Disha Ali, Roman Tesfaye et al.
Although South Asia has long been synonymous with persistent and unusually high rates of child undernutrition – the so called Asian Enigma – Bangladesh has managed to sustain a surprisingly rapid reduction in the rate of child undernutrition for at least two decades. We investigate this unheralded s...
Derek Headey, John Hoddinott, Seollee Park
This paper quantifies the factors explaining long-term improvements in child height for age z-scores in Bangladesh (1996/1997-2011), India (1992/1993-2005/2006), Nepal (1997-2011) and Pakistan (1991-2013). We apply the same statistical techniques to data from a common data source from which we have ...
Derek Headey, John Hoddinott, Seollee Park
Over the past two decades, many developing countries have made impressive progress in reducing undernutrition. We explore potential explanations of this success by applying consistent statistical methods to multiple rounds of Demographic Health Surveys for Bangladesh, Nepal, Ethiopia, Odisha, Senega...
Derek Headey, Phuong Hong Nguyen, Sunny S. Kim, Rahul Rawat et al.
It has recently been hypothesized that exposure to livestock constitutes a significant risk factor for diarrhea and environmental enteric disorder in young children, which may significantly contribute to undernutrition. To date, though, very little research has documented the extent of exposure to a...
Samira Choudhury, Derek Headey
Research from richer countries finds that dairy consumption has strong positive associations with linear growth in children, but surprisingly little evidence exists for developing countries where diets are far less diversified. One exception is a recent economics literature using the notion of incom...
Derek Headey, John Hoddinott, Disha Ali, Roman Tesfaye et al.
Phuong Hong Nguyen, Derek Headey, Edward A. Frongillo, Lan Mai Tran et al.
Decomposition is a useful and simple technique for analyzing nonintervention drivers of nutritional change in intervention and comparison areas. Improvements in underlying determinants explained rapid improvements in HAZs between 2010 and 2014 in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Amy J. Pickering, María Laura Alzúa
Should child growth replace diarrhoea as the primary child health outcome for sanitation trials? We appreciate Derek Headey's comment in relation to our trial1Pickering AJ Djebbari H Lopez C Coulibaly M Alzua ML Effect of a community-led sanitation intervention on child diarrhoea and child growth in...
Olivier Ecker, Harold Alderman, Andrew R. Comstock, Derek Headey et al.
Abstract The COVID‐19 pandemic resulted in severe income losses, but little is known about its impacts on diets and nutritional adequacy, or the effectiveness of social protection interventions in mitigating dietary and nutritional impacts. We first assess the likely impacts of COVID‐19 shocks in Ba...
Derek Headey, John Hoddinott
This paper therefore analyzes agriculture and nutrition linkages in Bangladesh, a country that achieved rapid growth in rice productivity at a relatively late stage in Asia’s Green Revolution, as well as unheralded progress against undernutrition. To do so the authors create a synthetic panel that a...
Derek Headey
As other researchers have done, Amy Pickering and colleagues (November, 2015)1Pickering AJ Djebbari H Lopez C Coulibaly M Alzua ML Effect of a community-led sanitation intervention on child diarrhoea and child growth in rural Mali: a cluster-randomised controlled trial.Lancet Glob Health. 2015; 3: e...
Derek Headey, Robert E. Black, John Hoddinott, Purnima Menon et al.
Childhood height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) have been improving in many countries over the last few decades. Most HAZ faltering in malnourished populations takes place during the first 1000 days of life, in the prenatal period and the first two years after birth, but little is known about how growth fal...
Olivier Ecker, Harold Alderman, Andrew R. Comstock, Derek Headey et al.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in severe income losses, but little is known about its impacts on diets and nutritional adequacy, or the effectiveness of social protection interventions in mitigating dietary and nutritional impacts. We first assess the likely impacts of COVID-19 shocks in Bangladesh ...
Olivier Ecker, Harold Alderman, Andrew R. Comstock, Derek Headey et al.
This study addresses the policy-relevant question of how, in the face of major economic shocks, social protection interventions can more effectively mitigate undernutrition. In particular, it considers the scope of scaled-up fortification of staples to avert the “hidden hunger” of micronutrient defi...