Analysis of Mortality Rate in Nigeria

Abstract

Mortality Rate in developing Countries remains one of the greatest challenges for monitoring, analyzing and projecting the health situation of the world's population. Because of limited resources, many developing Countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa lack vital registration systems that could reliably and continuously collect information on Mortality Rate. However, periodic reviews of pattern using mortality models could show new trends and may provide information for the planning of a Country's health care delivery services and a host of other programs. Previous studies have found that the Lee-Carter model works well with adult mortality data. In this current study, effort was made to see the performance of the model on infant and maternal mortality data in Nigeria. A modified version of the Lee-Carter method is used to model sex-combined infant and maternal mortality data of Nigerians aged 15-49 years for maternal mortality and infant mortality for the time periods 1990 to 2013. The model's parameters are estimated using the approach proposed by [1] based on the singular value decomposition technique, while the mortality index is predicted using the approach developed by [13]. The results show that the model follows the mortality pattern very well for most of the ages despite limited data; Forecast values of the mortality index show a gradual decline in mortality from 2014-2025 in Nigeria.