Empowering women in a community improves children’s immunization rates and overall health

The level of women’s community-level autonomy is associated with an increased number of children immunized above and beyond that which is seen with individual-level women’s autonomy. These results indicate that empowering women within households not only improves the individual mother’s children’s health, but also serves to improve the lives of other children within the community.

This analysis is from the 2011 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey that investigated the relationship between individual- and community-levels of women’s autonomy and children’s immunization status.