Mapping hunger in Ecuador: a report on mapping malnutrition prevalence

The Government of Ecuador has made a commitment to eradicating childhood hunger, and is presently undertaking steps to develop policies and programmes to achieve that goal. This paper argues that the first step toward realising the goal of reducing malnutrition is to identify the places where the problem is the most severe, allowing resources to be targeted appropriately. Using the technique of Small Area Estimation (SAE) to analyse data from the National Demographic and Maternal-Child Health Survey (ENDEMAIN), conducted in 2004 (CEPAR 2005), and the VI National Census of Population and Housing, conducted in 2001, the study assesses the prevalence of child malnutrition prevalence in Ecuador at the level of the canton.

The study finds that areas of high malnutrition prevalence are not always those where the greatest numbers of malnourished children are living. These results suggest establishing targeting mechanisms and priorities based on a dual strategy:

• one based on locating the large number of malnourished children living in relatively more affluent urban areas
• another based on reaching those areas that have very high prevalence, many of them in more remote and rural locations

It is noted that malnutrition is in many ways a more complex and less predictable phenomenon than
poverty, subject to the influence of more unobservable (in a survey setting) factors relating to child and caretaker characteristics and family environment. As such, the authors argue that field-testing of the prevalence estimates produced by the SAE technique is a high priority.

They also recommend that data collection efforts should be harmonised within countries. They suggest that a series of workshops could bring together the responsible people in a country to consider the possibilities for improving coordination among various surveys, which might start a productive process to improve the usefulness of all the data collection efforts.