The single biggest factor, by far, in reducing the rate of death among children younger than five is greater education for women. In all countries worldwide, whether females increase schooling from 10 years to 11, say, or two years to three, infant mortality declines, according to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Women with more education tend to have smaller families, in part because of increased employment opportunities and better knowledge about contraception; fewer children in a family improves the chances that an infant will survive. More education also helps women make better decisions about many health and disease factors such as prenatal care, basic hygiene, nutrition and immunization—which are vital to reducing the leading causes of death in children under five, shown below.
— Mark Fischetti
| Cause of death | Percent of deaths |
| Neonatal* | 41 |
| Other | 16 |
| Diarrhea | 14 |
| Pneumonia | 14 |
| Malaria | 8 |
| Injuries | 3 |
| HIV/AIDS | 2 |
| Measles | 1 |
*Preterm birth complications (12 percent), birth asphyxia (9 percent), sepsis (6 percent), other (5 percent), pneumonia (4 percent), congenital (3 percent), diarrhea (1 percent), tetanus (1 percent)
Source (data): World Health Organization, UNICEF
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6 Comments
Add CommentI must take issue and remind you that it is risky to infer a cause and effect relationship from a correlation. Why not infer that low infant mortality causes better education, or that global warming reduces infant mortality? The graphical data supports both conclusions as well as the one you chose to champion. It might be a little more valid and less chauvinistic to claim that the increase in age of mother when she has first child causes reduced infant mortality. We might even be able to infer a social benefit from abortions for young girls if we want to twist the facts to support a different political agenda.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wonder if the mother's education level was recorded in the year that her infant died for these data?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWouldn't that suggest that the education process--which would have had to have occurred, or not, before the death--was the cause and not the effect....
I concur with the previous comment by tbonefrog. It is worth repeating the old saying, correlation does not infer causation. Even the proposed correlation is suspect, much less the conclusion that "...Educated women, it seems, make wiser choices..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisConsider the developed countries (US, Canada, Europe, Japan etc) where mortality rates were already low and education levels high. When contrasting this against countries near the bottom (Chad, Sierra Leone, etc.) It would be a better interpretation to suggest that a society that educates women also provides better health care.
Going further one must consider and adjust for improvements to healthcare over the period from 1970 to 2009. A decent baseline for this would be the average improvement in mortality rates over the past 30 years in the developed countries. (You could even adjust for the education levels the same way.) When this adjustment is then applied to developing countries, many of them would show little if any improvement (in either statistic) and some such as Chad, Nigeria, and Kenya have worse relative mortality rates than they did in 1970.
Stated another way; A child born in a developed country still has approximately same multiplier applied to his/her chance of survival as a child born in a developing country.
A better interpretation of this data is that across the world child mortality rates are decreasing AND women's education levels are increasing. However, both could be ascribed to outside factors such as improvements in technology, political environment, nutrition, etc.
Furthermore, looking at the data, child mortality rates are decreasing faster in developing countries that are stable and have had better access to healthcare from developed countries.
I have a small quibble with Mr Fischetti when he substitues the phrase wiser choices for better decisions. Wisdom is a curious thing, it is thought to come from experience, or to be innate. It has little to do with formal education; more a product of correct intuition, than of factual knowledge. Education can fix ignorance, but the unwise are beyond teaching.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. Your graphic designer was probably very proud of compressing so much information into a color-coded, position and slant coded image that is so totally indigestible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this2. But I also would consider it more than a quibble to argue with the groupings by (parts of) continental land masses. For example, Canada and the US clearly don't belong with the other countries enclosed by the yellow border. Worst of all is putting the Czech Republic with the other former Iron Curtain countries. This proud people has always considered itself by background and tradition as part of western Europe! It was this that first got me thinking about the design.
Here is a suggestion for improving this graphic - instead of ordering the countries alphabetically (and grouped by region) - order them according to the ratio of the change in years of schooling to the change in child deaths (perhaps also grouped by region. If you order them this way, you will notice that some countries have increased women's education with little corresponding change in the infant and child death rate (i.e. Nigeria). Others have made small improvements in women's education, but substantial reduction in child deaths (i.e. Maldives). They method you use to order your small graphs can either assist or impede the reader's ability to make comparisons. I credit Edward Tufte for helping me understand the importance of ordering in data visualizations.
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