Assessment Of Maternal Factorsinfluencing Mortality Of Children Under Five Years Of Age In Karemo Sub-Countyin Siaya County,Kenya

ABSTRACT

About 17,000 children below five years of age die each day across the world, 99% occur in developing nations with 50% accounted for by Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Kenya’s high under-five mortality rate (U5MR) at 52 deaths per 1,000 live births won’t scale down without solving the high under-five mortality (U5M) in rural areas. Despite Karemo Sub-County in Siaya County having relatively good access to public and private health facilities, it nevertheless exhibit U5MR of 184 deaths per 1000 live births. This is over 3 times higher than the national U5MR; hence an understanding of risk factors is required as a way of fast tracking progress of achieving Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG) by 2030. The aim of this study was to assess maternal factors influencing U5M in Karemo Sub-County. Specifically, the study sought to identify maternal social-demographic, economic and health seeking behaviour on U5M. A retrospective cross-sectional design in which multi-stage probability sampling, Probability Proportional to Size (PPS) and simple random sampling was employed to recruit 299 mothers with under-fives (U5s) from 5 selected sub-location. Data was collected using pre-tested structured questionnaire on a face to face interview. Categorical data were analyzed against U5M using Chi-square test and logistic regression performed with SPSS version 22. Significant factors associated with U5M were; education, birth order, marital status, polygamy, occupation, birth interval and maternal age. Children born to mothers with tertiary level of education were 78% less likely to die than those whose mothers had primary education (OR=0.223, p