Linking Child Health, Maternal Labour Force Participation and Household Asset Endowments in Cameroon: What the People Say

Abstract

This paper is targeted objectives: to document the determinants of child health as informed by focus group discussion, to analyze what the people say concerning the relationship between child health and maternal labour force participation, to explore the perception of the people on the effects of child health on asset accumulation and to suggest public policies on the basis of the findings. We used seven focus groups to explore what the people say based on different health domains: access to public goods; inputs to health; benefits from better health; better child health and complementary activities; benefits of maternity leave and better child health, decision making concerning family health. Each focus group was made of eight participants: housewife, traders, farmers, drivers, teachers, technicians, medical personnel and military drawn from different religious groups: catholic, protestant mainline, protestant non-mainline, other protestant, Muslim, systemic and traditional belief. We observed that, parents make used of the extra time accrue to them due to better health for their children and family to do extra work that fetched them money. The increased family income is use to send their children to better schools, carter for their wellbeing as well as to promote asset growth and redistribution, thus, improving economic well-being and reducing poverty. In case of retirement or sudden retrenchment from the labour market, parents make use of the accumulated assets to increase their family income and maintain well-being, hence, reducing the psychological trauma on parents due to poverty. Based on these findings, we recommend that decision makers and actors concern with child health issues should considered, ease and promote child health outcomes. This is a key to narrowing the poverty and inequality gap between the poor and non-poor, rural and urban household residence, married and unmarried, employed and the unemployed, promote maternal labour force participation and household wealth accumulation in Cameroon.

Parental Education, Household Health, and Household Standard of Living: Evidence from Rural Cameroon

“…Later on, Baye and Fambon (2010) examined the link between parental education and child health, but they used older data coming from the Cameroon Household Consumption Survey data collected by INS in 2001. Tambi et al;(2014) used the focus group design method to link child health, maternal status on the labor market and household property in Cameroon. Their approach was non-technical since they refer to ""what people say on different health domains"", without targeting a specific child health outcome, and neglecting the rural Cameroon.…”

Children's Health, Maternal Labour Supply and Wealth Accumulation: Theory, Evidence and Policy Approach

“…Whereas child health problems remain the leading cause of ill health and death for women of child bearing age, impoverished women, especially those living in rural zones suffer disproportionately from unintended pregnancies, maternal death and disability, sexually transmitted infections and other problems related to their reproductive system and sexual behaviour [9]. Moreover, Baye and Fambon [2] observed that, in much of the healthcare demand literature, attempts at establishing linkages between health consumption and health production (wealth accumulation, productivity) have been embarked upon outside Africa [10] whereas knowledge on these issues are widely needed by very little effort in this direction has been made using data from SSA [11] the only studies that have attempted to tackle some aspects of reproductive health care, maternal labour and wealth accumulation are Baye and Fambon [2]; Tambi et al [12].…”