Child mortality and community-level education : an analysis of the impact of other women's education on child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

This thesis examines how child mortality is influenced by a mother’s own education and the education of other women in the community. The individual effects of education on child mortality have been thoroughly discussed in demographic papers since the late 1970’s. The possible community-level effects of education, however, have not received much attention in the literature. With data for 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa from the Demographic Health Survey, I have estimated logit regression models in SAS with child mortality as the dependent variable. Confirming the results of other studies, my models show that the effect of a woman’s own education had a significant negative impact on child mortality. The effect of education is reduced when variables that indicate the mother’s social background and her family’s wealth are included. When incorporating the variable for other women’s education, however, the total effect of education on child mortality was strengthened. Hence, the education of young women does not only reduce the mortality risk of their own children, but through the social diffusion of knowledge also the mortality of uneducated mothers’ children. This should be taken into consideration when evaluating girls’ education as a factor in mortality decline and education should probably be given even more attention in development programs. Furthermore, I wanted to examine the possible impact of community-level education on AIDS-related mortality. To check for such effects, I estimated models where I included interactions between HIV-prevalence in the country and the education variables. The interaction effect for average education was positive (though not significant) which could indicate that in countries with a high prevalence of HIV, the effect of average education on AIDS-related mortality is weaker than for countries with low HIV-prevalence.