There is a linkage between a mother’s ability to read and the survival of a child, four post-graduate students of the Department of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Ibadan (UI), Osinaiwo Inioluwa, Ogundoyin Oyinkansaola, Ahmed Kayode and Aderemi Suliyat, have said.
The postulation of the scholars is coming on the heels of the International Literacy Day on September 8.
According to the scholars, new data showed that a mother’s ability to read may matter as much to her child’s survival as the food on the table.
‘Every year on September 8, the world pauses to mark International Literacy Day. In 2026 – the day’s theme is ‘Literacy for People, the Planet and Prosperity,’ with global commemorations hosted in Mexico. But for millions of Nigerian mothers, literacy is not a global talking point. It is the difference between a child who thrives and one who does not.
‘According to the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) 2024, 32 per cent of Nigerian children under five are stunted, 18 per cent are underweight, and 8 per cent are wasted. Only 29 per cent of infants under six months are exclusively breastfed, and just 36 percent of newborns are put to the breast within the first hour of life. UNICEF estimates that about two million Nigerian children suffer from severe acute malnutrition every year, and it is one of the highest burdens anywhere in the world, with the North-West stunting rates climbing as high as 57 per cent.
‘ Malnutrition is already known to be implicated in roughly 45 per cent of under-five deaths in Nigeria. What is less widely discussed is the role a mother’s literacy plays in that statistic. Nationally, children of mothers with no formal education have about 55 per cent higher odds of being stunted and 49 per cent higher odds of being underweight than children of mothers with secondary education or higher. Children of mothers with no formal education have 55 per cent higher odds of being stunted than children of mothers with a secondary education.
‘The reason is not mysterious. A mother who can read is more likely to attend antenatal clinics, start breastfeeding early, sustain exclusive breastfeeding for six months, and introduce complementary foods at the right time, in the right variety, and with proper hygiene. She can interpret a food label, recognise a fortified product on a shop shelf, and follow simple written or illustrated feeding guidance. She can also spot the early warning signs of illness in her child and seek care before a treatable condition becomes a fatal one. Where that literacy is missing, the consequences increase across a lifetime. Malnutrition in early childhood is linked to poor cognitive development, weak school performance, and lower adult productivity, leading families and eventually communities into a cycle of poverty and poor health that repeats itself in the next generation.
‘This is not only a Nigerian problem, but Nigeria carries a large share of it. The country’s under-five population is one of the largest in the world, and the same NDHS figures show wide regional gaps: children in the North-West and North-East consistently fare worse than those in the South, tracking almost exactly with maternal school attendance in those zones. Nigeria already has the infrastructure to break that cycle: adult literacy programmes, primary healthcare centers, and women’s empowerment schemes operate in every state. What is missing is the deliberate integration of functional health and nutrition content into that existing infrastructure. An adult literacy class that teaches a woman to read her own name but not a food label, or a feeding chart, has done only half the job. Closing that literacy gap is not a job for the education sector alone; it demands coordinated action across health, education, agriculture, and women’s affairs, because its effect on child survival is direct and measurable, at a fraction of the cost of treating severe acute malnutrition once it occurs.
While making a call to action, the scholars said: ‘Federal and state ministries of education, health, and women’s affairs should co-design a functional nutrition-literacy curriculum for adult and out-of-school learning programmes, delivered in local languages and pictorial formats so no woman is excluded by dialect or by illiteracy itself. Primary healthcare workers should be trained and resourced to reinforce this learning at every antenatal and immunisation visit, and food and drug regulators should be pushed to simplify nutrition labelling for low-literacy consumers. Every naira spent teaching a mother to read her child’s growth chart is a naira spent preventing a stunted future. Nigeria cannot claim progress on literacy while its children are quietly paying the price of what their mothers were never taught to read. Now is the time for a change!’