Under-5 mortality is often used—perhaps implicitly—as a measure
of “population health”. But what is happening to adult mortality
in Africa? In a recent working paperi , we combine data from 84
Demographic and Health Surveys from 46 countries, and calculate
mortality based on the sibling mortality reports collected from
female respondents aged 15-49. The working paper is available
here and the database we used for the analysis can be found
here. We find that adult mortality is quite different from child
mortality (under-5 mortality)1. This is perhaps obvious to most
readers, but is clearly illustrated in figure 1. While in
general both under-5 and adult mortality decline with per-capita
income, and over time, the latter effect is much smaller for
adult mortality, which has barely shifted in countries outside
Africa between 1975-79 and 2000-04. But in sub-Saharan Africa,
contrary to under-5 mortality everywhere and to adult mortality
outside of Africa, adult mortality increased between 1975-79 and
2000-04 and t