| dc.description.abstract | Infant and child mortality rates in a given country reflect the health status and social wellbeing of
society. In addition to being an indicator of the nation’s wellbeing, child mortality on its own is
a recipe for emotional challenges bedevilling citizens which torment their peaceful lives. The
reduction of child mortality rates by two thirds for the period between year 1990 and 2015 is the
millennium development goal number four. It is part of the important global agendas that target
to make the world a better place to live in for humanity and a key component of universal health
as a right for all.
This research is aimed at establishing the relationship between healthcare costs and child
mortality rates in Kenya. With specific bias to under- five mortality rates, we explored the
variables of health care costs that influence child mortality outcomes in Kenya. Currently,
healthcare in Kenya is on greater proportion financed by out of pocket expenditure thereby
directly affecting household’s incomes. Other sources of healthcare financing include direct
government purchasing, private health insurance, the national health insurance and donor
funding. According to the National health Accounts of 2010, Private health care financing is
estimated at 36.7%, public 28.8% while Donors finance Kenya’s health care to the tune of
34.5% of the total health expenditure (THE).
In assessing the relationship between under-five mortality rates in Kenya and health care cost
among other correlates, we shall employ the maximum likelihood method in our analysis of
secondary data from the KDHS. We shall model our variables on a binary logistic regression in
order to establish the how healthcare costs and other secondary variables interact to affect underfive
mortality rates. In the model, under-five mortality was our dependant variable while
healthcare costs, gender, wealth index, employment status of the mother, child birth order and
education level of the mother were dependant variables.
Our findings show that Under-five mortality rates were negatively correlated with healthcare cost
contrary to our expectation that the relationship ought to be positive such that the higher the
health care cost the higher the likelihood of under-five mortality. These findings were
significant at P< 0.05. Further to that we found that, Employment status of the mother and
education level of the mother was also negatively correlated, confirming our expectations.
However the relationship established between under-five mortality and employment and
education status of the mother were in our case not significant. On the other hand, wealth index
of the household which in our case was a proxy for household income had a positive relationship
with under-five mortality probabilities, though the findings were insignificant at P<0.05. Gender
of the child and child birth order also showed positive correlation where gender=1 if male and 0
if otherwise.
Since Under-five mortality reduces with additional spending on health care of children, it’s our
humble view that the national government in liaison with county governments invest more
resources in child health programs for the country to achieve its millennium development goal.
The need for incomes through employment cannot be overlooked in this case. We therefore
recommend that governments initiate more investments to create jobs alongside offering amble
environments for investments in the private sector | en_US |
