Prevalence and Associated Factors of under-five Mortality in Ethiopia: Further Analysis of Ethiopian Mini Demographic and Health Surveys 2019

Abstract

Prevalence and Associated Factors of under-five Mortality in Ethiopia: Further Analysis of Ethiopian Mini Demographic and Health Surveys 2019

Introduction: Over decades, the efforts to tackle under-five mortality have not adequately addressed the problem in underdeveloped countries such as Ethiopia. Ethiopia developed transformation plan targets based on UNICEF and sustainable development goals. However, under-five mortality remained the major cause of loss of lives in the country due to inadequate evidence to trigger large-scale intervention. The current study aims to identify the associated factors of under-five mortality to enhance future policy decisions.

Methods: According to the study criteria, we extracted and cleaned data in STATA v. 15.0. The data was then weighted as per the sampling weight, primary sampling unit, and strata before analyzing in STATA 15.0. Data management consisted of descriptive (mean, standard deviation, and proportion or percent) and association statistics. Binary logistic regression was deliberated for this analysis and we checked each variable at 0.25 p-values to include in the model. The final p-value to declare association was p <0.05 and AOR with 95% CI was also applied to describe the results. The data source was the Ethiopian Mini Demographic Health Survey (EMDHS) 2019. EMDHS collected the data from 8,885 in a face-to-face manner with a 99% response rate.

Results: From 5,527 numbers of weighted women under-five analyzed in this study, the proportion of under-five mortality was 277.23(5.02%). Factors like 2nd birth order 0.52(0.35, 0.79), 3rd-4th 0.49(0.28, 0.84), 1-2 ANC visits 0.24(0.12, 0.49, ANC visit three’ 0.14(0.07, 0.28), ANC visit four and above 0.22(0.14, 0.36), in marriage mother 0.43(0.19, 0.96), ‘1-2 under-five children 0.02(0.011, 0.03), and greater than three under-five children 0.007(0.0007, 0.004) were all negatively associated with under-five mortality rate.

Conclusion: To obtain the exalted outcome out of this study, the government might need to increase antenatal care, women's education, institutional delivery, and modern contraceptive methods use through enhanced community mobilization, health education using community health workers, increasing access to essential cares of mothers and children, and birth interval.

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