Accounting for the rapid reduction of child stunting in Tanzania over 2005-2016
This research was undertaken in order to understand what factors have been driving stunting reduction in Tanzania over the recent past (2005-2015), and what can further accelerate progress against undernutrition in the near future (2015-2025). Chronic undernutrition in early childhood - often indicated by stunting - has highly detrimental consequences for long-term physical and cognitive development, school attendance and performance, and labor productivity and wages in adulthood. Understanding how countries have been able to successfully reduce stunting prevalence, and how they can accelerate this success in the future, are therefore critically important research questions. During the past decade, Tanzania has experienced rapid change in the nutrition status of children 0-5 years, particularly since 2010. Stunting declining from 44.3% in 2004-05 to 42.0% in 2010, before dropping sharply to 34.4% in 2015-16, a decline of 0.9 percentage points per year.
