Effect of Household Source of Drinking Water on Malnutrition among under Five Children in Ethiopia: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background Malnutrition remains a leading contributor to under-five morbidity and mortality in Ethiopia. Sources of household drinking water are consistently associated with child malnutrition and infection risk through fecal, oral transmission pathways, environmental enteric dysfunction, and repeated bouts of diarrheal disease. Objective To assess the overall effects of source of household drinking water on malnutrition among children under five years in Ethiopia. Methods A comprehensive search of relevant studies was performed using distinct databases. Data will be extracted using Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and exported to Stata-MPv-17 for analysis. A random-effect model was used to estimate the overall effect of the source of drinking water on children's malnutrition. A random or fixed effects model was used to calculate the pooled ORs with their 95% CI and presented on a forest plot. \(\:{I}^{2}\) -test statistics will be used for assessing heterogeneity among the included studies. The funnel plot and Egger's test for assessing publication bias were used. Result A total of eighteen peer-reviewed studies that met the inclusion criteria with a total of 3739 pregnant women were involved in this study. The pooled effect of nutritional education and counseling intervention was OR: 1.72: with 95% CI (1.09, 2.71). There was a high heterogeneity (\(\:{I}^{2}\) = 99%) observed between includes studies.