Nutritional outcomes remain an important development indicator and reflect a household's vulnerability to improved quality of life. Drawing upon recent household survey data from Egypt, this paper applies hierarchical models to test the effect of contextual factors on chronic undernutrition among under-five children and identifies the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics that underscore such vulnerability. Results indicate considerable neighborhood effects influencing a household’s nutritional choices. However, no significant effect could be identified for mother’s education and women’s decision-making power, but a clear positive association is evident between nutritional status and better health service utilization as well as child care and feeding practices. Focused intervention strategies need to augment household level behavioral change for these identified factors and supplement such individual efforts with targeted strategies aimed at vulnerable Egyptian communities to reduce child undernutrition. 1. Introduction Hunger and nutritional failure signify both the cause as well as the consequence of a household’s vulnerability to economic shocks, chronic and transient, and an important indicator of food insecurity, poverty, and deprivation of well-being. Assessment and understanding of the phenomenon of nutritional deprivation is crucial for gaining insights into vulnerability; it can be in identifying the causative factors and their pathways of influencing household food security. Furthermore, being a quantifiable outcome, objective indicators of nutritional failure can be decomposed to observe the relative influence of sociocultural, economic, community-specific, and geographical vulnerabilities, which aids in prioritizing corrective intervention programs. Conventional vulnerability analyses has been predominantly focused on the production and availability of grain staples at the expense of other indicators, such as lack of access to health services, nutritional status, cultural practices, and gender inequality. Such analyses failed to identify which population groups fell at relatively greater risk, and the underlying reasons. This paper concentrates on child malnutrition, owing to its sublime importance towards development goals and future economic impact. Malnourishment during the early years can contribute to the prospective vulnerability of a household and can jeopardize the possibility of moving out of poverty traps. We examine relative vulnerability across households and individuals towards adverse nutritional outcomes, from the
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