We aimed to establish if enteric permeability was associated with similar biological processes in children recovering from hospitalization and relatively healthy children in the community. Extreme gradient-boosted models predicting the lactulose rhamnose ratio, a biomarker of enteric permeability, using 7,500 plasma proteins and 34 fecal biomarkers of enteric infection among 89 hospitalized and 60 community children aged 2-23 months were built. The R² were calculated in test sets. The models performed better among community (R²: 0·27 [min-max: 0·19, 0·53]) than hospitalized children (R²: 0·07 [min-max: 0·03, 0·11]).  In the community, LRR was associated with biomarkers of humoral antimicrobial and cellular lipopolysaccharide responses, and inversely associated with anti-inflammatory and innate immunological responses. Among hospitalized children, the selected biomarkers had few shared functions. This suggests enteric permeability among community children was associated with a host response to pathogens, but this association was not observed among hospitalized children.