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Single Motherhood and Child Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Life Course Perspective

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Demography

Abstract

Single motherhood in sub-Saharan Africa has received surprisingly little attention, although it is widespread and has critical implications for children’s well-being. Using survival analysis techniques, we estimate the probability of becoming a single mother over women’s life course and investigate the relationship between single motherhood and child mortality in 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Although a mere 5 % of women in Ethiopia have a premarital birth, one in three women in Liberia will become mothers before first marriage. Compared with children whose parents were married, children born to never-married single mothers were significantly more likely to die before age 5 in six countries (odds ratios range from 1.36 in Nigeria to 2.61 in Zimbabwe). In addition, up to 50 % of women will become single mothers as a consequence of divorce or widowhood. In nine countries, having a formerly married mother was associated with a significantly higher risk of dying (odds ratios range from 1.29 in Zambia to 1.75 in Kenya) relative to having married parents. Children of divorced women typically had the poorest outcomes. These results highlight the vulnerability of children with single mothers and suggest that policies aimed at supporting single mothers could help to further reduce child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Notes

  1. We refer to all union dissolutions that are not a consequence of a spousal death as “divorces,” although this term does not necessarily indicate a formal or legal divorce.

  2. The countries covered are the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

  3. In the Ethiopian survey, the Ethiopian calendar is used, which corresponds to a start date of September 12, 1999, in the Gregorian calendar.

  4. For missing dates, we use values imputed by DHS. The DHS imputation procedures first identify an initial logical range for the missing date based on other relevant dates (such as the age of first marriage, age of first sexual intercourse, and children’s birth dates) and then randomly assign a date within this range.

  5. Women who delivered their first child or got married before age 10 are dropped from the analysis (N = 37 in Nigeria; 19 in Ethiopia; 17 in Zambia; 11 in Zimbabwe; 5 in Tanzania; 1 in Malawi, Ghana, and Sierra Leone; and 0 in Kenya, DRC, and Liberia).

  6. Additional analyses (not shown) also included a dummy variable for whether fathers resided in the household at the time of the survey. This variable was not significant in any country after controlling for mother’s marital status.

  7. The percentage of children with missing information on their breast-feeding status ranges from only 12 % in Kenya to 31 % in Sierra Leone, which partly reflects differential levels of birth date displacement across surveys.

  8. The percentages presented in Table 1 are lower than true under-5 mortality rates (5 q 0) because they do not take into account right-censoring of children below age 5.

  9. Unlike our estimates using standard DHS questions, continuously married mothers in countries with marital history calendars are not restricted to women in their first marriage.

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Acknowledgements

Funding to support this work was generously provided by the Nike Foundation. We wish to thank Judith Bruce at the Population Council and Kathleen Beegle at the World Bank for their valuable comments and insights.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, McGill University, Stephen Leacock Building, Room 713, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T7, Canada

    Shelley Clark

  2. Charles University and Institute of Sociology, ASCR, Jilska 1, 110 00, Prague 1, Czech Republic

    Dana Hamplová

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Correspondence to Shelley Clark.

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Clark, S., Hamplová, D. Single Motherhood and Child Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Life Course Perspective. Demography 50, 1521–1549 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0220-6

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