Child Welfare Deprivation in Rural Nigeria: A Counting Approach

The study applies the counting approach to explain the deprivation concept among children under 5 years of age using the 2008 DHS data. Five dimensions of deprivation were used: safe drinking water, sanitation, housing, health, and nutrition largely recognized in the SDGs. In all, a total of 13561 children were sampled. About half of the children were males with a mean age of 28.27 months old. The assessment of dimensional deprivation showed that children are most deprived in sanitation, health, and access to safe drinking water while they were least deprived in nutrition. The situation is also marked with regional disparities with northern regions reporting higher deprivation rates than the southern regions but this rate was significantly higher in the sanitation dimension across regions. Considering deprivation counts, 33.9% of children suffer from more than three deprivations and approximately 85.2% from at least two deprivations. Child deprivation should be tackled using a holistic approach through social protection programmes to resolve children’s problems in an integrated manner which would in this case be more efficient and effective in safeguarding children’s rights to survival and development. Identifying the children suffering from single and multiple deprivations can help to target the interventions.