Income Health expenditure Sanitation Education Poverty Policy interventions Agricultural resilience

This study examines the impact of food crises on children's health in Nigeria over the period 1981–2024, amid recurring economic shocks, conflicts, pandemics, and policy failures that have exacerbated food insecurity and malnutrition. Drawing on secondary data from the World Bank and employing the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Error Correction Model (ECM) approaches, the research investigates the short-run and long-run relationships between food crises, child health indicators (such as stunting, wasting, and under-five mortality), and social factors including income, health expenditure, sanitation, education, and poverty.
The findings indicate that food crises have a significant positive association with deteriorated child health outcomes, intensifying vulnerability to infections, cognitive impairments, and mortality, with nearly 45% of under-five deaths linked to malnutrition. Income and sanitation exhibit negative effects on child health, underscoring the roles of economic inequality and inadequate infrastructure in perpetuating cycles of poverty and poor health. However, education and health expenditure show insignificant impacts, highlighting implementation gaps and inefficiencies in policy delivery. Cointegration tests confirm long-run equilibrium relationships, while diagnostic checks affirm model robustness. The study concludes that Nigeria's protracted food crises pose a critical threat to national development, necessitating integrated, evidence-based interventions. Recommendations emphasize strengthening agricultural resilience, poverty alleviation, sanitation infrastructure, educational reforms, and efficient health investments to mitigate malnutrition and foster sustainable child health improvements.