Adult mortality in Southern Africa using deaths reported by households: some methodological issues and results

Rob Dorrington, University of Cape Town
Ian M. Timaeus, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)
Simon Gregson, Imperial College

Censuses in developing countries quite often ask households to report of the number of deaths in a period immediately prior to the census but these data don’t seem to have been used much to produce estimates of adult mortality in Southern Africa in recent years. This paper analyses the potential biases in these data and applies a combination of the generalized growth balance and synthetic extinct generations method to data adapted from censuses in Zimbabwe to produces estimates of mortality. These estimates are compared with those produced by other researchers and found to be broadly consistent and the results are interpreted in the context of similar applications to data from Swaziland and Botswana.