Prevalence of stunting and associated factors among public primary school pupils of Bahir Dar city, Ethiopia: School-based cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: Stunting is a well-established child-health indicator of chronic malnutrition, which reliably gives a picture of the past nutritional history and the prevailing environmental and socioeconomic circumstances. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the prevalence of stunting and associated factors among public primary school children of the Bahir Dar city. METHOD: A cross-sectional study was carried out from March to June 2019. Data were coded and entered into the Epi-Data and exported to SPSS version 23 software. The pupil was stunted if the height- for-age was ≤ -2 SDs from the median growth standards according to the WHO. A descriptive summary was computed using frequency, percent, mean, median and standard deviation. A simple logistic regression model was fitted to identify associated factors between the independent variables and the dependent variable at a 95% confidence interval (CI) and p-value <0.05. RESULTS: 370 primary school pupils were included in the study with the mean age of 10.15 (± 2.23 SD) years. 51.6% of the pupils were females. The total prevalence of stunting was 15.13% (95%CI; 11%, 19%). The burden of stunting was higher in the age group of 11 years and older. Pupil’s age older than 11 years (AOR = 15. 6; 95%CI; 3.31, 73.45; p-value < 0. 001) and male sex (AOR = 7. 07; 95%CI: 2.51, 19.89; p-value < 0. 0002) were significantly associated with stunting. CONCLUSION: The prevalence of stunting was relatively lower than the regional estimated stunting level. Older age and male sex were significantly associated with stunting.