Determinants of timely initiation of complementary feeding among children aged 6-23 months in Ethiopia

Introducing complementary feeding either early or later than 6 months is associated with future negative health outcomes. However, many women in Ethiopia do not follow WHO standard time to feed their children, which might be due to various demographic, economic, access, and availability of services. Thus, we aimed to identify factors attributing to the problems to assist future interventions. We used cross-sectional EMDHS 2019 for this analysis. We cleaned the data and 4061 women with under 2 years children were identified. We applied multilevel binary logistic regression in Stata v.15. Model comparison was based on log-likelihood ratio, deviance, and other criteria. We presented data using mean, percent, 95% CI, and adjusted odds ratio (AOR). The timely complementary feeding was 36.44% (34.93-37.92%). Factors like preceding birth intervals (AOR = 1.97 95% CI 1.62-1.39), primary education (AOR = 2.26 95% CI 1.40-3.62), secondary above education (AOR = 1.62 95% CI 1.10-2.38), and rich wealth index (AOR = 1.25 95% CI 1.03-1.52) were some of the associated factors. The magnitude of timely initiation of complementary feeding was diminutive. Authors suggest that interventions considering maternal education, empowering mothers economically, equity access to health services, and birth planning a good remedy.

Automated summary

Introducing complementary feeding either early or later than 6 months is associated with negative health outcomes. This study aims to identify factors contributing to the deviation from the WHO standard feeding time in Ethiopian women. Results show that factors such as education level, birth intervals, and wealth index are associated with timely initiation of complementary feeding.