Understanding Cameroon's Rising Maternal Mortality Rates, 1991-2004: Regression and Decomposition Approach

Floriane Kamgaing, Institut de Formation et de Recherche Démographiques (IFORD)
Sarah Giroux, Cornell University

The Millennium Development Goal 5A seeks to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by 75% between 1990 and 2015. However, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa will fail to reach the goal (UN 2010), including the focus of this study, Cameroon. Between 1991 and 2004, maternal mortality rates rose from 550 to 669 deaths per 100,000 live births. Given this, a detailed study examining the risk factors associated with maternal mortality is warranted. This paper does this by first identifying and constructing a typology of risk factors for maternal mortality and then uses a standard logistic regression to examine the impact of socio-economic status of households on trends maternal mortality. It then employs an innovative decomposition method, to examine how much of growth in maternal mortality were driven by changes in rates of maternal mortality by SES group versus changes in the size of each SES group.