Estimating child and infant mortality in Egypt through a Bayesian approach for small area

In the Egyptian context, delayed fertility transition compared to neighboring countries, can be in part ascribed to the delay in the fall of infant mortality rates. Infant mortality was high in Egypt till the 1980s. Since then, infant mortality recorded significant progress: in 2001, the number of deaths per 1000 births was 38 against 97 in 1984. However differences are still significant between governorates: in urban governorates, the 2008 level is 29 deaths per 1,000 births. In rural Upper Egypt, mortality was about 39 ‰. No previous studies had attempted to estimate infant and child mortality in Egypt for small geographical areas. Strong socio-economics differences and inequalities exist between urban and rural setting, Upper and Lower Egypt and even between small area in the same region or city. Those differences justify the need to calculate infant and child mortality rates at the local level. We will account for this problem using a Bayesian hierarchical model for small area: model-based estimators will be derived and their precisions compared with alternative estimators proposed in literature. We use data from Egyptian Demographic and Health Surveys (1995 and 2005), Egyptian population register and Egyptian Population and Housing Census (1996 and 2006).