Grant: CANADA-HOPE Scholarship Program / Fellowship

Many countries have experienced rapid declines in infant and child mortality in the last decades. Nevertheless, progress towards neonatal and child survival in low and middle income countries has been rather slow and mortality rates remain ten fold greater than the rates observed in higher income countries. In India, efforts to reduce child mortality have intensified recently. The National Rural Health Mission of the Government of India has initiated several interventions to increase child survival. Efforts have also been made to monitor India's maternal and child health indicators using large scale surveys. This research proposal will leverage the work of the Registrar General of India in collaboration with the Centre for Global Health Research that is producing the first estimates of cause-specific child mortality at the sub-national level by combining it with information from large scale sample surveys such as National Family Health Survey and District Level Household Survey that for the last decades has been collecting data on sub-national coverage of health interventions and prevalence of key health practices. The innovative and unique combination of these three impressive surveys will help India in identifying priority areas for action by contextualizing the barriers to child survival according to prevailing socio-cultural practices; quantifying the impact of targeted interventions by estimating the annual number of lives saved and estimating the impact that local action could have on India's national neonatal and child survival rates.