Marital status and women’s nutrition in Africa

Marriage can provide protection (in various forms) to women but also comes with vulnerabilities. How much so will depend on the context. Marriage and marital shocks are both common in Sub-Saharan Africa, but the institutions relevant to women’s security vary within the region. The paper investigates whether women who have never married or have suffered a marital rupture have worse nutritional status relative to married women in their first union. Conditional means for women’s nutritional status are compared by marital status across 20 countries. Overall, the results indicate significantly lower nutritional status for Africa’s widowed and divorced women between ages 15 and 49. This is generally found to be the case with country and household fixed effects and controls for HIV status. However, looking at country-specific results underlines that disadvantage is by no means universal. Once one controls for likely confounders, a few countries stand out as places where women are especially vulnerable to marital shocks, notably Ethiopia, Rwanda, Swaziland and Zambia. This is the first study to systematically investigate the individual welfare consequences of marital dissolution for women in Africa, and to assess how widespread and generalizable the events and outcomes noted in the existing literature are within and across countries.