Mentor: Jennifer Bulanda, Ph.D.

Under-5 mortality, the probability that a child will die before reaching the age of five, is widely used as a core indicator of a country's overall development and population health. However, global under-5 mortality has declined substantially in recent decades, millions of preventable child deaths still occur each year, concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and linked not only to limited healthcare access but to broader social and environmental conditions in which children are born and raised: poverty, inadequate sanitation, and malnutrition. Under the social determinants of health framework, child mortality reflects structural inequalities and development gaps between countries rather than the performance of any single healthcare system alone.

This project applies that framework to a comparative case study of three countries with contrasting development profiles, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and India, to examine how three non-health Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators are associated with under-5 mortality between 2000 and 2023. The outcome of interest is SDG 3.2.1 (under-5 mortality rate per 1,000 live births). The three predictors are SDG 1.1.1 (proportion of the population living below the international poverty line), SDG 2.2.2 (prevalence of wasting among children under 5), and SDG 6.2.1 (proportion of the population using safely managed sanitation services).

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