T. Lakshmanasamy
Background: To improve public health and achieve sustainable development goals, child immunisation is important and for improving child immunisation improved maternal education is the key. Maternal education improves the knowledge, attitude and the need for childhood complete immunisation. Improving female education also improves women empowerment and bargaining power within the marital household and the intrafamily resource allocation, especially on the health and education of female children. In India, women and female children are much discriminated against as a result India could not achieve the target and is away from the goal of full immunisation.
Method: This paper estimates the effect of mother’s education on the child receiving all vaccinations - a dose of BCG, three doses of DPT and three doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV) - within the age of 12-48 months. As the dependent variable is binary whether the child has received complete immunisation or not - a logistic regression model is used. The nationwide data are derived from the 6th round of the Demographic and Health Survey of India for the year 2015-16 (DHS-VI), consisting of 12817 observations.
Results: The logit estimates show that the effect of maternal education on complete child vaccination is significantly positive. Woman with at least formal education is better placed in seeking child immunization, which is further facilitated by the mother’s knowledge and awareness of immunisation programmes. Socioeconomic variables like status, father’s education, birth order, urban residence and religion significantly influence child immunisation status, but community and birth intervals are not important for child immunisation. Significantly more boys receive complete immunisation than girls, showing some form of neglect of female children.
Conclusion: An inclusive education, health and family welfare approach that improvesfemale schooling, health knowledge, and positive attitudes toward modern healthcare among mothers and female empowerment are beneficial for complete vaccination of children in India towards improving child health and reducing child mortality in India, a measure that will take India a step closer to achieving the SDG goals.