This heterogeneity seems to be sizeable. Maternal social participation is particularly effective in increasing child HAZ in context where the human capital is scarce, and specifically for those children whose mothers have no formal education. The association between maternal membership and child HAZ for these children remains robust even after controlling for unobservable characteristics at community level (column 3). Compared to the corresponding estimates in column 2, the inclusion of community fixed effects tends to lower the point estimates in the child HAZ equation. This suggests some role for unobserved community heterogeneity in explaining child nutritional status and possibly maternal social participation and its association with child HAZ.

Note that, after adding the interactions terms, mothers’ education is still predicting a better nutritional status for their children. Mothers with higher education have healthier children and the effect of their education on child health is quite large.<sup>33</sup> According to _WHO Child Growth Standards_ , one standard deviation of an 11 month old child’s height corresponds approximately to 2.5 centimeters.<sup>34</sup> The results reported here indicates that the average child aged 11 months old whose mother has no education is shorter by 0.8 centimeters up to 0.9 centimeters than a comparable child whose mother has completed primary education and secondary education, respectively. Similarly, the same 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 groups.

Among the other confounding factors, household composition matters. Controlling for the household size, living in a household together with other children and adolescents significantly reduces child nutritional status, which presumably indicates that it reduces the availability of per capita resources. Mother’s height and child’s birth weight are positively associated with child HAZ. Additionally, those children whose mothers are employed full time have higher HAZ which suggest that the positive income effect is compensating the potential negative effect of less time spent together.

# **7.2  Maternal social capital and 5 years old child HAZ**

All results reported in Table 6 refer to the estimates of HAZ at 5 years as a function of maternal membership measured either at wave 1 or wave 2. In the first column I report the previous estimates for 1 year old child HAZ as a benchmark. In the second column, I report the long-term association between maternal memberships measured at wave 1 on HAZ at 5 years. In the third column, both maternal membership and child nutritional status are measured at age 5. This last model is analogous to the contemporaneous specification reported in the first column but at a later stage of child’s life.

33 Remarkably, a father’s human capital has almost no association with child HAZ. Only those fathers with more than secondary education contribute positively and in a statically significant amount to child nutritional status (not reported). Presumably, given the high correlation between father’s education and household’s wealth index, most of paternal education effect goes through income.

34 The average age in the sample is 11 month. One standard deviation of 11 months old children correspond to 2.52 and 2.33 centimetres for girls and boys respectively. See http://www.who.int/childgrowth/en/ for more details about how the height-for-age indicator is standardized.

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