Time Series Analysis for Under-Five Mortality Rate in Ethiopia

Authors

  • Worku Girma, Biruktawit Nesredin, Wudneh Ketema

Abstract

Under-five (Infant and Child) Mortality Rate is the probability of a child dying within the period of birth and his/her fifth birthday, expressed per 1,000 live births. (UNICEF, WHO, World Bank, 1990). Ethiopia is one of the high burden child mortality countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Few records available on child mortality in Ethiopia appear with different rate, underpinning the high child burden. Infant mortality also declined from 97 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2000 to 48 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2016, which is about a 50% reduction in the last 16 years. (EDHS, 2016) The general objective of this study will be to fit time series analysis for under five year mortality rate of Ethiopia in 1966-2018G.C. A time series data, comprising of annual estimates of Under-five Mortality rates for Ethiopia from the year 1968 to 2018G.C, obtained from the World Bank website is used for the analysis. The time series model the Box-Jenkins (ARIMA) are built for the decline of Ethiopia’s under-five Mortality.  The average under-five mortality rate of Ethiopia for the last 53 years was 172.6. The extreme and lowest mortality rate of Ethiopia was 244.7 and 55.2 respectively. The ARIMA (2, 2, 3) model is best fit model for the Under-five mortality Rates for Ethiopia and the seven years out-of-sample forecast values for the Under-five mortality rates for Ethiopia; 52.98, 51.03, 49.21, 47.43, 45.61, 43.69 and 41.68 deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively from the years 2019-2025GC also shows a decline. Finally, researcher concludes that the forecast value of 41.68 deaths per 1,000 live births with a 95% confidence interval of (31.75, 51.61) for year 2025, shows that Ethiopia may not be poised to become a middle-income country by 2025 per the World Bank data. The decline in the forecasted values of the Under-five Mortality Rates for Ethiopia by the ARIMA Model, shows that the government’s policies and strategies towards the realization of the MDG4 goal are actually working positively towards the goal and also its did achieve but would recommend that the government continues with those policies and strategies.

Published

2021-04-05

Issue

Section

Articles