New Life Tables for Sub-Saharan African Countries

Pierre Ngom, African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC)
Alex Ezeh, African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC)

Under-five and adult mortality indicators obtained from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data have so far remained disjointed in the sense that they have not been used to arrive at a more comprehensive mortality profile over the life course in countries lacking such information. This paper proposes a method for deriving national life tables from DHS data. First, survivorship functions are directly estimated for the age groups between 0 and 55 years using the birth and sibling history modules of the DHS data. The logit transformations of these indicators are then regressed linearly on existing accurate empirical mortality curves (mainly from INDEPTH publications). The regression coefficients from this step are used to extrapolate, to age 85+, the truncated DHS life tables estimated earlier. Results from 16 sub-Saharan African countries demonstrate that DHS data can be used to produce reliable life tables for countries where such information is not available.