The responsiveness of household asset endowment to child health outcomes in Cameroon: the role of women empowerment

Women are expected to play an important role in fostering development and nation-building. This has made the establishment of a platform for them to demonstrate their abilities and capabilities a key global requirement for inclusion in development strategies. In this context, while the bilateral relationships between women's empowerment and child health, and women's empowerment and household assets have been widely studied in the empirical literature, the nexus among the trio has received negligible empirical attention. To fill this gap, this paper explores the influence of women's empowerment on the relationship between child health and household assets. It uses pooled data from the 2011 and 2018 Cameroonian Demographic and Health Surveys. Multiple correspondence analysis and control function modeling strategy are used in the data analysis. We find that child health independently associates with improvements in household asset endowments (HAE). Including interaction of women’s empowerment and child health, the direct effect of child health on HAE becomes negative, but its indirect effect via women’s empowerment is associated with improvements in household asset endowments. Overall, we find that a standard deviation increase in child health is associated with about 17 percentage points improvement in HAE. This is evidence that women’s empowerment complements the effect of the nexus between child health and HAE. This finding supports the view that interventions that promote child welfare to boost household welfare are more potent in the context of women’s empowerment and associated labor market activities.