# **8  Conclusions and Discussion**

This study suggests that, where human capital is scarce, social capital might have important implications for child development. According to my findings an 11 months old child whose mother has no formal education but is a member of at least one community organization is 1.1 centimeters taller than a child whose mother has the same educational level but does not participate in any community group. This effect is quite sizable considering that it is equivalent to the effect of maternal education, which has been proved to be one of the main child development determinates.

Looking at maternal membership when the child is 5 years old, there is no evidence of a statistically significant association with child nutritional status. There are different alternative explanations which could justify this result. For example, it might be the case that maternal membership is more effective when the child is younger because some of the community organizations organize initiatives directly intended to help mothers with new born children. Alternatively, this result might be consistent with the theory that early investments in children are more effective than investments in later stages.

Looking at the pathways through which social participation affects child HAZ, descriptive statistics suggest that social participation facilitates access to resources by expanding mothers’ network and because being a member is a pre-requisite to access additional resources. However, the support received does not seem to be a pathway through which the association between maternal membership and child nutritional status flows. Alternative pathways involving no tangible elements such as the acquisition of useful information or a change in attitudes and investment behavior might play a crucial role in explaining the association between maternal social capital and child development, as suggested by previous literature. However, identify causality is difficult and data limitations do not allow for further exploration of this hypothesis.

This study represents a step forward in the comprehension of the role of social capital in child development. In fact, it is the first comprehensive study of the impact of social capital on child nutritional status using data from a developing country. Furthermore, from a methodological point of view it deals with multiple problems in a step-by-step manner, in an attempt to exploit as much as possible the longitudinal setting of the data. Even if the question of causality versus selection bias needs further investigation, this paper establishes the correlation between maternal social participation and child nutritional status, by using fixed effects to control for unobservable heterogeneity at the community level.

Finally, it draws interesting conclusions and has important implications for the designing of programs able to launch poor households on a sustainable pathway out of poverty. This analysis provides suggestive evidences that promoting individual participation to community initiatives might be the way to go to alleviate poverty among the poorest. Even in very deprived context characterized by scarce human and physical capital there is space for effective policy interventions in a relatively short term. Low educated mothers might be helped in growing up healthy children, facilitating the cooperation and association at the community level.

However, further research is required in the analysis of the mechanisms through which maternal social capital might affect child development. If the empowerment channel matters and social 27