Infant Mortality and Morbidity in Uganda: A Case of Bulenga Parish

Abstract

The main objective of this study was to investigate the factors associated with Infant Mortality and Morbidity. Concisely the study analyzed: (𝑖) the influence of socio-demographic factor; (𝑖𝑖) the effect of environmental factors and the influence of antenatal/maternal care to child mortality focusing on those that are applicable to Uganda on under-five mortality incidences. To operationalize these objectives, a cross sectional descriptive survey research design was employed to explore both the descriptive statistics and inferential statistics in a bid to study relationships between various factors with the use of chi-square tabulations. The study utilized strictly primary data source through interviewing all sampled households so as to gather information relevant in reaching at the research objective with the use of a well-structured questionnaire. Liable respondents were drawn by the use of simple random sampling, that is, the one that do not require replacement of the item picked from the draw and thus respondents always have an equal chance of being selected into the sample and owing to the fact that it guarantees that the sample chosen is representative of the entire population, thus ensures that statistical conclusions are valid. The majority of the respondents (84.0%) were married whereas only 16.0 percent were single and not married. 56.0 percent had attained secondary level of education, followed by 36.0 percent of the women had obtained tertiary and above level of education and the least percentage of women (16.0%) were primary school leavers yet the majority of the women (92.0%) were residing in the urban area and only 8.0 percent were residing in rural areas. The study further revealed that education level of the mothers, type of residence, their respective occupation, family size, and income levels as socio-demographic variables are statistically significant with under-five mortality incidences unlike family size and marital status of the mothers (P-value =0.05). First, the government and other stakeholders need to boost parental education on the importance of a healthy living environment and use of safe drinking water. This would control cases of water borne diseases and the related mortality. It is also very important for the government to take action to provide clean water supply to household’s without piped water in order to reduce under 5 mortalities.