Armed Conflict and Child Mortality in Africa: A Geospatial Analysis
Publisher: The Lancet
Author(s): Zachary Wagner, Sam Heft-Neal, Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, Robert E. Black, Marshall Burke, and Eran Bendavid
Date: 2018
Topics: Basic Services, Data and Technologies, Livelihoods
A substantial portion of child deaths in Africa take place in countries with recent history of armed conflict and political instability. However, the extent to which armed conflict is an important cause of child mortality, especially in Africa, remains unknown.We identified 15 441 armed conflict events that led to 968 444 combat-related deaths and matched these data with 1·99 million births and 133 361 infant deaths (infant mortality of 67 deaths per 1000 births) between 1995 and 2015. A child born within 50 km of an armed conflict had a risk of dying before reaching age 1 year of 5·2 per 1000 births higher than being born in the same region during periods without conflict (95% CI 3·7–6·7; a 7·7% increase above baseline). This increased risk of dying ranged from a 3·0% increase for armed conflicts with one to four deaths to a 26·7% increase for armed conflicts with more than 1000 deaths. We find evidence of increased mortality risk from an armed conflict up to 100 km away, and for 8 years after conflicts, with cumulative increase in infant mortality two to four times higher than the contemporaneous increase. In the entire continent, the number of infant deaths related to conflict from 1995 to 2015 was between 3·2 and 3·6 times the number of direct deaths from armed conflicts.