Impact of the Juntos Program on chronic child malnutrition in Peru, 2016-2018

Abstract

Chronic malnutrition child is one of the main public health and social welfare problems. Despite the government’s efforts, chronic child malnutrition rates continue to be a problem, especially in the rural sector, putting the health of children at risk in the early stage of the life cycle, since chronic child malnutrition has implications long-term on human capital. For this reason, this work evaluates to what extent the National Program for Direct Support to the Poorest, Together, contributes to the reduction of chronic child malnutrition in rural Peru, in the period 2016-2018, as well as determined the effect of the education of the mother affiliated with the Juntos program on chronic child malnutrition of her children under 5 years of age in rural Peru. For this purpose, the quasi-experimental design is used, which consists of constructing a counterfactual scenario and also makes use of the matching technique called Propensity Score Matching, which will identify pairs of similar individuals in their observable characteristics, using the database panel of the ENDES between the period 2016-2018. The results found indicate that the Juntos program in 2016, 2017 and 2018 impacted on the reduction of chronic child malnutrition in rural areas by 0.7%, 0.9% and 0.7% respectively. Likewise, those mothers with a higher level of education decrease the probability of having chronic childhood malnutrition by 4.89%, 2.07% and 2.60% in the years 2016, 2017 and 2018 respectively.