According to the World Health Organization, 6.3 million children, under the age of five, died in 2013 worldwide. Saving young children's lives is among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are developed by the United Nations. Goal number 3 in the SDGs calls for ending preventable deaths of newborns and children under five years of age and reducing under-five mortality to be at least as low as 25 per 1000 live births by 2030. Egypt along with several other developing countries has achieved significant progress in fulfilling this goal.
The progress toward achieving the SDGs may mask socio-economic disparities underneath, as the SDGs for health call for improvement in national averages, which may be attained either by improvement in the health of the poor, or the better-off. Accordingly, the improvement in national averages may result from an improvement in the health of the better-off, while the poor is lagging behind.
In his article Socioeconomic Inequalities in Infant Mortality in Egypt: Analyzing Trends Between 1995 and 2014, published in Social Indicators Research, Professor Mesbah Sharaf and co-author Ahmed Rashad (Qatar University) examined the pattern of child mortality rates in Egypt, and as to whether the progress that took place in reducing the national mortality rates has been uniform by socio-economic status. They find a significant drop in infant mortality rates from 63 deaths per 1000 live births in 1995 to 22 deaths per 1000 live births in 2014. However, analyzing trends over the study period reveals no corresponding progress in narrowing the socioeconomic disparities in childhood mortality. Infant mortality rates remain higher in rural areas and among low-income families than the national average. Infant mortality rate among the poor remains twice the rate of the richest wealth quintile. Results of the multivariate analysis show higher odds of infant mortality among rural households, children who are twins, households with risky birth intervals. They find no statistically significant association between infant mortality and child's sex, access to safe water, mothers' work, and mothers' nutritional status. Infant mortality is negatively associated with household wealth and regular health care during pregnancy.
Professor Sharaf's study is also available as a Department of Economics working paper: Socioeconomic Inequalities in Infant Mortality in Egypt: Analyzing Trends between 1995 and 2014.
Dr. Mesbah Sharaf is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Economics and obtained his PhD. in Economics at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. His research areas are Development Economics, Health Economics and Applied Econometrics.