BACKGROUND The rate of decline in child mortality is too slow in most African countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing under-five mortality by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015. Effective strategies to monitor child mortality are needed where accurate vital registration data are lacking to help governments assess and report on progress in child survival. We present result...

BACKGROUND Disparities in health outcomes between the poor and the better off are increasingly attracting attention from researchers and policy makers. However, policies aimed at reducing inequity need to be based on evidence of their nature, magnitude, and determinants. OBJECTIVES The study aims to investigate the relationship between household socio-economic status (SES) and under-five mort...

Infants and child under-five years' morbidity and mortality trends, due to several causes, reflect a country level of socioeconomic development and quality of life. The aim of this study is to identify the factors related to infant~ and child mortality in Wad-Medani Children Teaching Hospital in central Sudan. It investigated the relationship between the demographic and socioeconomic factors an...

More than two years after the 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan, China, the total number of lives lost remains unclear, particularly for children under five years old. Mortality for this age group can be estimated using a variety of techniques, but sample proportion estimates may be unreliable in areas with low populations of children under five. To address this problem, we propose a hierarchical Bay...

Background Fiscal Decentralization (FD) in many cases is encouraged as a strong means of improving the efficiency and equity in the provision of public goods, such as healthcare services. This issue has urged the researchers to experimentally examine the relationship between fiscal decentralization indicators and health outcomes. In this study we examine the effect of Fiscal Decentralization in...

The majority of the world's population lives in urban areas, and regions with the highest under-five mortality rates are urbanising rapidly. This 7-year interrupted time series study measured early access to care and under-five mortality over the course of a proactive community case management (ProCCM) intervention in periurban Mali. Using a cluster-based, population-weighted sampling methodolo...

Background: Under-five mortality is one of the indicators of the millennium development goals (MDGs) for the child mortality reduction goal. Understanding the social determinants of underfive mortality is helpful to narrow the gap between different social classes. Therefore, this study focused on the social determinants of under-five mortality in Ethiopia using EDHS 2011 data. Methods: The data...