| Summary: | Since the early 1980s, child health policies promoted by the international health community and national governments in the developing world have focused on a selective disease control approach which targets the leading causes of infant and child mortality through low cost medical interventions and their dissemination to the population through social marketing and mass media techniques. More recently, investment in maternal education has been increasingly addressed as an essential component of child survival strategies in the developing world following increasing evidence in national and cross-national surveys which demonstrates a positive relationship between maternal education and reductions in child mortality. With respect to the impact of disease-specific interventions on child health and survival, numerous constraints to the impact of medical interventions have emerged as these interventions were transferred from clinical settings to field situations in the 1980s and 1990s. With regard to the role of maternal education in child health and survival, despite considerable research on this relationship at the aggregate level, there remain significant research gaps surrounding the pathways through which maternal education affects child health at the household level; these gaps have partially constrained the inclusion of maternal education as a fundamental component of child health policies at the implementation level. This thesis examines these issues concurrently in a sample of 401 households in rural Egypt.
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