The Effect of Child Health policies on Child Health among West African Countries

Child health being paramount to hearts of global leaders has pumped humongous resources towards plummeting mortality and negative growth of children around the globe. Governments have tightened their focus on spotlighting a set of highly effective child health policies to deal with the issue of child health. Nonetheless, paucity empirical works’ cynosure actually focus on examining the effect of child health policies on the child health, which this study sought to fill the gap in existing literatures by employing the use of panel data( 2000-2016) collected from West Africa countries. Child health policies affect child health through direct and indirect channels. Random effect model was employed for analyzing the direct effect whiles structural equation model (SEM) was used for the indirect effect. Results from the indirect effect analysis bespeak that, child health policies produce significant effect on environmental damage, parents’ health and mothers’ education, with no significant effect on nutrition of mothers. The pass-through effect on child health produced mixed results. Estimates appertaining to direct effect analysis evince that, child health policies have significant effect on under-five mortality rate with respect to diarrhea, prevalence rate of malnutrition (stunting, height-age) with no significant effect on under-five mortality rate of malaria.