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Reducing Child Mortality

How should we reduce child mortality? The power of knowledgeable parents

We have compiled a unique dataset by combining demographic health survey data from 45 low income countries. This data provides us with child survival outcomes for 278,000 children, along with data on their morbidity, the socioeconomic characteristics of their families, and other factors. The goal of this research is to help us analyze alternative interventions to reduce child mortality. The main conclusions, from our first research paper using this data, are:

It appears that treatment, rather than disease prevention, is most important when explaining differences in health performance across poor countries. Consistent with this finding, we also concluded that water and sanitation infrastructure have very little impact on child mortality.
Parental education is a very strong predictor for child survival outcomes, even after controlling for wealth.
We found no difference in the level of child survival, nor the equality of treatment indicators, when comparing countries with predominantly private healthcare systems versus those with public healthcare systems.

We concluded that a key component of improving health must be to raise parent’s health knowledge and general awareness of health issues. This is in contrast to much of the medical health literature, which focuses on making sure that children receive specific interventions. Since many of these interventions, such as antibiotics or oral rehydration therapy, are very basic and quite inexpensive, it may be that well educated parents are able to achieve these for their children in most regions, and hence knowledgeable parents, possibly more than a strong clinical health system, is the most essential ingredient for child survival.