Background
Education is expected to bring about positive behavioral changes that could lead to better health, especially parental education is one of the most important factors for a child’s health and development. However, the role of parental education on optimal infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices in Bangladesh is inconclusive. The objective of this review is to summarize how parental education is associated with IYCF practices in Bangladesh.
Method
This review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guideline. A systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and Google Scholar. Record searching, study selection and data extraction was performed using Endnote online and Covidence software, respectively. The Newcastle-Ottawa scale was used for quality assessment of the included studies.
Results
Out of 414 initial hits, 34 studies were included for this review. Of the included studies, 32 were cross-sectional, one was a randomized controlled trial, and one was a retrospective cohort. Most of the studies (n=24) were nationally representative whereas 10 studies had populations from district and sub-district level. Included studies considered different IYCF related indicators, including breastfeeding (n=22), complementary feeding (n=8), both breastfeeding and complementary feeding (n=2), both breastfeeding and bottle feeding (n=1), and pre-lacteal feeding (n=1). Parental education was found positively associated with complementary feeding practices. However, the role of parental education on breastfeeding, in general, was ambiguous. High parental education was associated with bottle-feeding practices and no initiation of colostrum.
Conclusion
Public health interventions need to focus not only on non- and/or low educated parents regarding complementary feeding but also on educated mothers on initiation of colostrum and proper breastfeeding practices.
Registration
This systematic review is registered to PROSPERO (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/) with registration ID: CRD42022355465
This paper addresses three areas of interest: how do existing studies definefemale political participation in the local governance of Bangladesh? What isthe availability and quality of these studies: and what are the obstacles toeffective female participation? A systematic, search strategy using searchkeys and boolean operators were used for finding out the studies which metthe main questions of the review. A step by step process followed by aspecifically defined inclusion-exclusion criteria was used for synthesisingthe final studies for the review. From a large number of studies, the presentreview finally included ten studies which were most relevent to the centralpurpose of the review. The reviewed studies which defined politicalparticipation from diverse perspectives have been synthesied here. Thequality of the reviewd studies were assessed based on four criteria: studydesign, sample size, data collection methods, and data analysis. Based onthese evaluation criteria, most of the reviewed studies were found to havesmall sample size, unspecified study design, vague mode of data collection,and superficial data anaylsis. The key barriers to the female politicalparticipation were found to be institutional, economic, socio-cultural andpsychological in nature.
Effective political participation was measured with a questionnaire that was completed by 680 (347 female, 333 male) representatives to the rural local governance of Bangladesh, Union Parishads. The questionnaire included four scales. Females scored significantly lower than males on the scales of having influence on political decisions, active political participation and initiatives, and political commissions of trust; and significantly higher on victimisation from faulty meeting procedures. Influence on political decisions varied according to age group for females but not for males. Of the males, 94.7% participated in meetings regularly compared to only 30.1% of the females. Of the females, 16.9 % reported they were not informed about the time of the meetings, while this was the case for only 3.7% of the males. None of the committees used voting at the monthly meetings. Of the males, 94.9% reported that meeting decisions were taken through mutual understanding, while only 15.3% of the females were of that opinion. Of the females, 64.8% reported that decisions were taken by the chairman alone, and 19.9% of them that decisions were taken by the chairman and male members only. It may be concluded that despite recent legislative measures, female political participation still needs to be improved in Bangladesh.
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