Abstract:
Infant mortality is the death of a child at any time after birth and before reaching his or her first
birth day. This death toll is measured by the infant mortality rate. Sub-Saharan Africa has the
world’s highest rate of infant and child mortality. Mortality rates tend to be higher for infants
and child mortality. The aim of this study was to examine the spatial distribution and factors that
affect infant mortality based on 2016 Ethiopia Demographic and health survey dataset using
spatial and multilevel Count Regression modeling models. The descriptive result showed that a
total of 10547 mothers’ were covered from 11 regions. And also the descriptive Statistics states
that the number of infant death calculated showed (2.18) that the variance (0.994) is greater
than the mean (0.526) indicating over-dispersion. And the highest mean number of infant
mortality is occurred in Somali (0.69) and the lowest is, in Addis Ababa (0.089). The spatial
distribution result using ArcGis software reveal that 71% of the mothers have not face death,
whereas 0.6% of them faced at least 5 infant death per mother in their life time before survey.
According to the result of GeoDa results infant mortality per mother were clustered in national
level. High risk of infant mortality was mostly occurred in the eastern part of all regions and low
risk of infant mortality in central and western part of the regions. According to multilevel
Poisson model using R out put the random intercept and slope model of multilevel ZINB model
are the best fit the data, and the study also showed that there is a significant regional variations
of infant mortality and also the result also revealed that infant deaths per mother differs among
regions of the country in terms of residence, age of mother and household size. Accordingly
random ZINB result, the variables residence, age of mother, household size, age of mother at
first birth, breast feeding, weight of child, use of contraceptive, birth order, wealth index, father
education level and birth index were found to have significant effect with infant mortality. This
study also suggest that efforts are needed to extend educational programmers aimed at
educating mothers on the benefits of contraceptive use, age of first birth, and spacing birth
interval in order to reduce infant mortality.
