Rural–urban disparities in caesarean deliveries in sub-Saharan Africa: a multivariate non-linear decomposition modelling of Demographic and Health Survey data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Globally, the rate of caesarean deliveries increased from approximately 16.0 million in 2000 to 29.7 million in 2015. In this study, we decomposed the rural-urban disparities in caesarean deliveries in sub-Saharan Africa. METHODS: Data for the study were extracted from the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys of twenty-eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We included 160,502 women who had delivered in health facilities within the five years preceding the survey. A multivariate non-linear decomposition model was employed to decompose the rural-urban disparities in caesarean deliveries. The results were presented using coefficients and percentages. RESULTS: The pooled prevalence of caesarean deliveries in the 28 countries considered in the study was 6.04% (95% CI = 5.21-6.88). Caesarean deliveries' prevalence was highest in Namibia (16.05%; 95% CI = 14.06-18.04) and lowest in Chad (1.32%; 95% CI = 0.91-1.73). For rural-urban disparities in caesarean delivery, the pooled prevalence of caesarean delivery was higher in urban areas (10.37%; 95% CI = 8.99-11.75) than rural areas (3.78%; 95% CI = 3.17-4.39) across the 28 countries. Approximately 81% of the rural-urban disparities in caesarean deliveries were attributable to the differences in child and maternal characteristics. Hence, if the child and maternal characteristics were levelled, more than half of the rural-urban inequality in caesarean deliveries would be reduced. Wealth index (39.2%), antenatal care attendance (13.4%), parity (12.8%), mother's educational level (3.5%), and health insurance subscription (3.1%) explained approximately 72% of the rural-urban disparities in caesarean deliveries. CONCLUSION: This study shows significant rural-urban disparities in caesarean deliveries, with the disparities being attributable to the differences in child and maternal characteristics: wealth index, parity, antenatal care attendance, mother's educational level, and health insurance subscription. Policymakers in the included countries could focus and work on improving the socioeconomic status of rural-dwelling women as well as encouraging antenatal care attendance, women's education, health insurance subscription, and family planning, particularly in rural areas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".