The Immediat cause of undernurition is an inbalanced diet;
The underliying causes are:
Inapproppriate/insufficient food supply, poor breastfeeding and winning management, culture and religious food customs.
There is also a wide range of contributing factors in the literature as described below:
The rural areas are the most affected by under nutrition among under five years. This could be linked to low diversity of food sources in these remote areas compare to urban cities, as well as poverty.
In many studies children characteristics as gender, birth weight, age, illnesses, child order among others in the family and child spacing, are potential contributing factors to the issue. Researchers have different views related to the gender more prone to undernutrition. This can be explained by competition.
Another common findings in many studies is the parents education in general and mostly mother education strongly related to undernutrition prevalence this can be explained by the fact that educated women in contrary of non educated ones, are likely to seek for help and care in case of difficulty, they also are incline to adopt new medical advices for child health improvement. The mother’s education contributes to mother’s empowerment and women are child centered in expenditures, thus likely to acquire the child’s needs.
Maternal health status is not the least in this bundle of predictive factors for under five years under nutrition, especially in relation with early unset childhood undernutrition. Low mother body mass index, low height and perinatal depression have been described to increase risk of undernutrition. This could be also explained by reduce or lack appropriate health-seeking behavior in depressed mothers, and also a reduction in child needs awareness, another mechanism is by the impairment of mother child relationship. Interaction between mother and child including breast feeding pactice, is another predictor of child undernutrition often ignored. Reduce attention or over pressure on the child during feeding have negative influences on appropriate food intake of the child.
The situation is of concern with basic causes as the refugees sitation resulting from civil crisis in neighbouring countries; namely Tchad and Centrafican Republic.
