Maternal education, as part of parental education, influences child nutrition outcomes through the effect of higher incomes and better use of available information about child health and nutrition (Garrett and Ruel 1999; Smith, Ruel, and Ndiaye 2004; Charmarwabagwala et al. 2005).

Ajieroh 2009 found that generally in the urban areas, a child of a woman with primary education has a height- for-age of 0.41 Z-score higher than the child of a woman with no education. The increase for a child whose mother has a secondary education is substantially higher than that for primary education at 0.54. Compared to a child whose mothers have no education, a child of a woman with primary education has higher height-for-age Z-score of 1.1 in urban North Central and 1.3 in urban North West. Where the mother has secondary education, the increases in Z-scores are 1.15 in North West. In the rural areas maternal education, including having primary and secondary education did not indicate any significant effects on child nutrition. At the regional level, no significant effect was indicated in the rural areas, and maternal reading literacy also had not significant effect in the rural areas.

By the agro ecological zone, maternal secondary school education was associated with an increase of 0.69 height-for-age Z-scores in rural Guinea Savannah, and in urban Sudano-Sahelian savannah a strong and positive effect is indicated. Being literate is associated with improved maternal nutrition in rural areas generally, and specifically in rural NW and NE. Other studies did show a significance of education to intermediary variables- antenatal usage etc which is then significantly associated to child nutritional status (see Doctor et al 2011, who worked with a different data set to Ajieroh). Being literate is associated with improved maternal nutrition in rural areas generally, and specifically in rural NW and NE.

Ajieroh’s study does not indicate any significant effect of female headship on maternal and child nutrition: in all likelihood their resources may be less. However, the mother deciding alone had a positive and significant effect on child growth in the rural Sudano Sahelian zone. Ajieroh concludes that empowering mothers to earn income and take decisions, complemented with nutritional and public health services, is more likely to improve both child and maternal nutrition in the rural areas than in urban.  There is clearly a difference between nutrition and its causes in rural versus urban areas, a number of studies (Ajieroh 2009; Agee 2010; Olalekan 2009; Oninla 2007; Vanderjagt 2009) finding the nutrition situation much worse in the rural settings.