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Malnutrition is associated with an inadequate diet, poor health and sanitation services and insufficient care for young children. A combination of income growth and nutrition interventions are therefore suggested to adequately tackle this issue (Haddad et al. 2003), yet evidence to support this claim is often not available, especially for African settings. This paper evaluates the joint contribution of income growth and nutrition interventions towards the reduction of malnutrition. Using a four round panel data set from northwestern Tanzania we estimate the determinants of a child's nutritional status, including household income and the presence of nutrition interventions in the community. The results show that better nutrition is associated with higher income, and that nutrition interventions have a substantial beneficial effect. Policy simulations make clear that if one intends to halve malnutrition rates by 2015 (the MDG objective), income growth will have to be complemented by large scale program interventions.

Poverty maps, spatial descriptions of the distribution of poverty in any given country, are most useful to policy-makers and researchers when they are finely disaggregated, i.e. when they represent small geographic units, such as cities, towns, or villages. Unfortunately, almost all household surveys are too small to be representative at such levels of disaggregation, and most census data do not contain the required information to calculate poverty. The 1996 South African census is an exception, in that it does contain income information for each individual in the household. In this paper, we show that the income from the census data provides only a weak proxy for the average income or poverty rates at either the provincial level or at lower levels of aggregation. We also demonstrate a simple method of imputing expenditures for every household in the census, using information in the October Household Survey (OHS) and the Income Expenditure Survey (IES) in 1995. The resulting predicted household consumption values are plausible and provide a good fit with the IES data. We also provide an example, which demonstrates that poverty headcount can be imputed with fair precision for Magisterial Districts and for Transitional Local Councils. Finally, our paper serves as a reminder of the value of comparing various data sources for external validation and it underlines the need to make more use of census data that seems to be underutilized in most developing countries.

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Child stunting in Ethiopia has persisted at alarming rates, despite enormous amounts of food aid, often procured in response to shocks. Using nationally representative data, the study finds that while harvest failure leads to child growth faltering, food aid affected child growth positively and offset the negative effects of shocks in communities that received food aid. However, many communities that experienced shocks did not receive food aid. In sum, while food aid has helped reduce child malnutrition, inflexible food aid targeting, together with endemic poverty and limited maternal education, has left the prevalence of child stunting at alarming levels.Key words: child growth, child malnutrition, Ethiopia, food aid, shocks.Children that grow slowly experience poorer psychomotor development and interact less frequently in their environment (GranthamMcGregor et al.). They tend to delay school enrolment, and score less well on cognitive tests (Martorell, 1997). Moreover, the detrimental effects of slow height growth during early childhood may be long lasting. For example, Alderman, Hoddinott, and Kinsey find that in Zimbabwe, lowered stature as a pre-schooler following exposure to the 1982-84 drought resulted in a permanent loss of stature of 2.3 cm, a delay in starting school of 3.7 months, and 0.4 grades less of completed schooling. The combined effect of these factors was estimated to reduce lifetime earnings by 7%.Rural households in developing countries often live in risky environments, unable to fully protect their consumption against temporary income shocks such as droughts (Dercon). The available empirical evidence to date on the effect of such income shocks on child growth suggests pervasive growth retardation (Martorell, 1999;Hoddinott and Kinsey). As such temporary income shocks may cause permanent damage to children's future welfare and cogTakashi Yamano is Fellow at the Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development. Harold Alderman is Lead Human Development Economist. Luc Christiaensen is Economist in the Africa Region of the World Bank.The authors would like to thank John Hoddinott, Martin Ravallion, Norbert Schady, and John Strauss as well as seminar participants at the Chronic Poverty Conference at Manchester University for useful comments. Nonetheless, the findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed are entirely those of the authors, and they do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. nitive abilities (World Bank), further empirical investigation to quantify the magnitude of the effect of such shocks on early child growth is called for.A common intervention to alleviate the effects of drought shocks is food aid, often motivated by explicit reference to its beneficial effect on child malnutrition. Ironically, however, there is limited research on the effect of food aid on child growth (Barrett). The literature has so far mainly focused on food aid targeting, i.e., whether the poor are reached or not (...