Correlation of Literacy and Infant Mortality

Background

Educated women are known to take informed reproductive and healthcare decisions. These result in population stabilization and better infant care reflected by lower birth rates and infant mortality rates (IMRs), respectively. A strong relationship exists between a woman's literacy and her use of reproductive and maternal health services. Literacy is directly related to the status of a woman, her age at marriage, her decision power and to mention especially, capability to access health care services. Literacy not only increases women's self-confidence but also makes them more exposed to information and thereby altering the way others respond to them. 

Female self-confidence and literacy improve the chances that women will obtain meaningful employment, reduces their demand for children and improves health-seeking behavior, makes them aware of nutritional requirements-all these combined improve the chances of survival of both-the mother and the baby. The present project focuses on the relationship between the female literacy and mortality rates (IMR and MMR) and establishes an inverse relationship between them. The study also finds a positive correlation between infant mortality and maternal mortality

Hypothesis

Null hypothesis: There is no relationship between female literacy and infant mortality levels.

Alternative hypothesis: There is relationship between female literacy and infant mortality levels.

Statistical Methods

Data wrangling and pythonic calculations:

Showing the number of values and rows in our dataset:

    

Running Some Tests

Steps for fitting the model:

1. Imported 'statsmodels'
2. Setting the 'Y' and 'X' variables
3. Estimating the multi-variate regression model and then fitting the model

Plotting slope and intercept (X and Y), independent and dependent variables and CI set to None:

A side-by-side bar plot to illustrate the relationship between literacy and infant mortality:

Results

There is an Adj. R-squared of 0.59 which explains that countries with higher literacy has less infant mortality.

So, 40% of the variance is unknown. Basically there is a high correlation between literacy and infant

mortality and the linear regression model clearly demonstrates that in the line graph above.

Conclusion

To reduce infant mortality, women have to have the proper health information to take a better care of their

health and their infants' health. Female literacy is actively highly important for both population

stabilization and better infant health. Countries with weaker educational systems & lesser access to healthcare

services have higher infant mortality rates