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Abstract
Infant mortality has been a major public health issue in Ethiopia. The main objective of this study
was to determine socioeconomic, demographic and environmental factors that may have impact on
infant mortality in Ethiopia. The study used data from the 2016 Ethiopian Demographic and Health
Survey. Survival analysis techniques such as the Kaplan-Meier survival estimates, the Cox
proportional hazards model, accelerated failure time model and parametric shared frailty models were
employed to analyze the data for survival time of infants. Results showed that out of 2621 children
under the age of one year who were born during the five years preceding the date of the survey only
496 experienced the event or died before age one. The Weibull-Gamma shared frailty model was
found to be the best model for predicting survival time of infant in Ethiopia. The unobserved
heterogeneity in the population of clusters (regions) as estimated by the Weibull-gamma shared
frailty model was θ=0.096 (p-value=0.004) indicating the presence of regional variation on infant
mortality. Mothers’ educational level, breastfeeding status, household size, birth type, mother
occupation, age at first birth and preceding birth interval were significant predictors of the survival
time of infants in Ethiopia. Mothers educational level prolonged the survival time of infants by a
factor of (𝜙 =1.403 and 𝜙 =2.094) for primary and secondary and above education as compared to
uneducated mothers. Educating mothers, breastfeeding and child spacing need to be considered when
planning and developing policies against infant mortality. |
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