Abstract

Timely initiation of complementary feeding is providing the baby with solid or semisolid foods in addition to breast milk at 6-8 months of age. Due to many reasons, this feeding is extremely low in middle income and developing countries. In the current study, we aimed to identify factors contributing to the recent dataset of the Ethiopian demographic health survey. We used cross sectional EMDHS 2019 for this analysis. We cleaned the data and 4,061 women under under-two years of children were identified. We applied multilevel binary logistic regression in Stata v. 15. Model comparison was based on log-likelihood ratio, deviance and other criteria. Data were presented using mean, percent, 95% CI and Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR). The timely complementary feeding was 36.44% (34.93-37.92%). Factors like preceding birth intervals (AOR=1.97 95% CI: 1.62-1.39), primary education (AOR=2.26 95% CI: 1.40-3.62), secondary above education (AOR=1.62 95% CI: 1.10-2.38) and rich wealth index (AOR=1.25 95% CI: 1.03-1.52) were some of the associated factors. It is highly suggested that comprehensive intervention on maternal education, empowering mothers economically, equity access to health services and birth planning should be targeted because they are attributable to maternal education, wealth index, preceding birth interval, number of under five children and regional disparities throughout the country

Keywords: Complementary feeding, Multilevel, Children, Ethiopia