In this note, the Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA) reports results on maternal and child anthropometric measures using data collected in Yangon and Ayeyarwady as part of the Rural-Urban Food Security Survey (RUFSS). This in-person study, conducted between October–November 2023, follows households that were previously part of a series of 10 rounds of high-frequency telephone surveys conducted between June 2020 and December 2021 (Headey et al., 2022). The initial sample for the survey consisted of pregnant mothers who were registered from antenatal clinics in peri-urban Yangon in early 2020. In this latest survey round, researchers from MAPSA revisited this sample of mother-child pairs to gather anthropometric data (along with other nutrition-relevant indicators) with the objective of estimating the prevalence of stunting, wasting, and maternal body mass (BMI). MAPSA successfully followed up with 702 mother-child pairs located in peri-urban Yangon and townships in Ayeyarwady.
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The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 and the military takeover of the democratically elected government in early 2021 has largely prevented the implementation of in-person surveys necessary for the collection of anthropometric data. To redress this knowledge gap, we implemented an in-person survey of mothers (caregivers) and young children in urban and peri-urban Yangon and rural Ayeyarwady in October and November 2023. This in-person 11th round of the Rural-Urban Food Security Survey (RUFSS) involved data collection on a wide range of socioeconomic indicators, but also child anthropometric outcomes such as length and weight. In this study, we report results for height-for-age z scores (HAZ) and weight-for-height z scores (WHZ) relative to international reference standards, as well as stunting (HAZ < -2) and wasting (WHZ < -2). Because of high and rising rates of overweight/obesity among adults in the RUFSS survey, we also examined the number of children were overweight (WHZ > +2) and mildly overweight (+1 <WHZ< +2).
Around 18 percent of children in the sample were stunted, and around 8 percent were wasted, while only 1 percent were overweight. Although the RUFSS data are not truly representative of Yangon because of oversampling of poorer peri-urban households (who we expected to have high rates of stunting and wasting than the general population of under-5 children), we find that stunting rates in the RUFSS sample are substantially lower than in the DHS 2015–16 Yangon sub-sample, suggesting significant improvement in a number of underlying determinants of malnutrition. However, 26 percent of the sample reported moderate or severe food insecurity, and food insecurity was strongly associated with both stunting and wasting. Moreover, the sub-sample of children from extremely food-insecure households had exceptionally high rates of both stunting (38 percent) and wasting (18 percent).
A key programmatic implication is that nutrition-sensitive social protection transfers should consider targeting resources using the food insecurity experience scale (FIES), as well as other easily identifiable poverty indicators such as household assets.
