[en] Full text: Background: Malnutrition continues to be a major public health problem in Bangladesh. Roughly half of all children under five years in this country show evidence of chronic malnutrition. Reasons behind this range from household distribution of foods, dietary practices, distribution of land, access to education and health facilities and infrastructure development. So, as a part of building up a regular alert system, a surveillance program named Food Security Nutritional Surveillance Project (FSNSP) was setup in 2009. This study is tasked to determine the effect of mother’s education on child nutritional status. Methodology: FSNSP has been implementing a nationally representative surveillance over three major seasons in Bangladesh: post-aman harvest period (January-April); monsoon (May-August); and post-aus harvest season (September-December). The project is tasked to track key food security, nutrition and health indicators through these three seasons of the year and to build national capacity to sustain the system in the future. FSNSP also aims to provide timely information about the health, agriculture, economic, and social sectors with regard to food security and nutrition. It targets food insecure areas through seven vulnerable agro-ecological zones. The ultimate sampling unit is all households with an adolescent girl/woman from 10 to 49 years of age or a child less than five years of age. In each season, 9024 households are interviewed. Results: Almost 30% of the study children were found stunted whereas 40% were underweight and 11% were wasted of which 10.6% were moderately acute malnourished (MAM). Prevalence of under nutrition in the form of stunting, underweight and wasting varies significantly across maternal educational status. Rates of under nutrition were significantly lower among children of higher educated mothers (stunting: 17.2%, underweight: 26.3% and wasting: 10%) compared to children of illiterate mothers (stunting: 37.5%, underweight: 46% and wasting: 13.6%). In addition, children of educated mothers were less likely to become moderately stunted (OR = 0.41, p-value<0.01), underweight (OR = 0.46, p-value<0.01) and wasted (OR = 0.71, p-value<0.10) compared to children born to illiterate mothers in unadjusted models. These findings persisted even after adjusted for some important socio-economic, demographic and health related characteristics. Moreover, proportion of getting knowledge from proper source about child feeding increases significantly with the increase of maternal education (from 17% for illiterate to 36% for educated mothers). Conclusion: Results from the study showed that maternal education is the key to reduce under nutrition in Bangladesh. It can be inferred that female education is essential to break the cycle of malnutrition. (author)