groups, women’s groups, communal kitchens or mothers’ clubs, sports groups, peasants organizations, groups for irrigation, security committees or political parties/groups. Maternal participation is measured at both wave 1 and wave 2. Given that children are on average 1 and 5 years old, respectively, maternal participation occurs before the child was born or during the first months of life and when the child is about 4 years old.

In both cases I define the maternal social capital as a dummy instead of using a continuous measure of the number of memberships in different organizations.<sup>14</sup> The main reason is that the continuous variable has been derived from summing up the different kinds of organizations she reported being a member of. In wave 2 about 20 percent of those mothers reporting membership of at least one organization do not specify which organizations they are member of and thus the continuous variable for membership would be missing.

Beside maternal social participation (defined by maternal membership as specified above), the SASCAT tool also includes a measure of a civic participation and cognitive social capital (Harpham et al., 2002). In the present analysis both are used as factors associated with maternal membership. Maternal civic participation is measured by an ordered variable taking value 0 if the respondent in the past 12 months never joined with others in the community to address a particular issue and or have contacted the local authority about problems in the community. Otherwise, it takes value 1 or 2 if just one event or both events took place.

The cognitive social capital (CSC) is a combination of the responses to the questions on whether the caregiver feels as part of the community, whether she feels people in general can be trusted, whether she feels people generally get along with each other, and whether she thinks people would try and take advantage of her if they could. The variable is constructed by summing together the four questions and it takes a value between 0 and 4.

# _Physical capital_

The household physical capital is measured by a wealth index developed by the World Bank and Macro International for UNICEF (2000). The wealth index is the simple average of three factors: housing quality, consumer durables and services. The housing quality component is based on the number of rooms per person in the household and the main materials used for the walls, roof and floor. The consumer durable component is based on the number of assets owned by the household (e.g. radio, refrigerator, bicycle, television, car etc), excluding productive assets. The services component is based on whether or not the dwelling has electricity, whether or not drinking water is piped into the dwelling, the type of toilet facility (private or shared with other households) and the main type of fuel used. The wealth index for each household is a score between 0 and 1.

Furthermore, I use a dummy measuring if the household has suffered at least one shock (such as natural disasters, death in the family or crop failure) which resulted in a reduction in the economic welfare of the household before the mother knew she was pregnant.

> 14 To check the robustness of the empirical results to changes in the definition of social capital, I also carry out some sensitivity analyses. All the results in the empirical analysis are substantially confirmed defining membership as a continuous variable or using as cut point two instead of one membership, i.e. considering members those mothers who are members of at least two community groups.

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