The impact of parental death and socioeconomic factors on children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Mass orphanhood in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) results from conflict, poverty, and disease. In the absence of resilient fostering systems, orphans may be more vulnerable to health hazards after losing one or both parents, depending on each parent's care roles. Using multiple logistic regression on national household survey data for four SSA countries, this thesis explores: 1) which socioeconomic and demographic factors are risk factors for child undernutrition and 2) whether different types of orphans confer varied degrees of vulnerability to undernutrition. Child age, household wealth, and mother's education are significant and reliable predictors of undernutrition. The child's sex, and maternal and paternal orphanhood also have some impact, but the results are not as reliable. These findings add to limited scholarship about health outcomes of maternal versus paternal orphans. More investigations into individual countries' orphan crisis are needed. --P.ii.