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Sources:

Estimated maternal mortality ratio
Estimates developed by the World Health Organization http://apps.who.int/ghodata/ (accessed June 2011).

Infant mortality rate
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2011), World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision. available in http://www.un.org/esa/population/unpop.htm; supplemented by official national statistics published in United Nations Demographic Yearbook 2008, available from the United Nations Statistics Division website, http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/default.htm (accessed June 2011); and data compiled by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) Statistics and Demography Programme, available from the SPC website, http://www.spc.int/sdp/ (accessed June 2011).

Footnotes:

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Technical notes:

The maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is the annual number of female deaths from any cause related to or aggravated by pregnancy or its management (excluding accidental or incidental causes) during pregnancy and childbirth or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, per 100,000 live births, for a specified year.

WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and The World Bank have developed a method to adjust existing data in order to take into account these data quality issues and ensure the comparability of different data sources. This method involves assessment of data for completeness and, where necessary, adjustment for underreporting and misclassification of deaths as well as development of estimates through statistical modeling for countries with no reliable national level data.

Data on maternal mortality and other relevant variables are obtained through databases maintained by WHO, UNPD, UNICEF, and WB. Data available from countries varies in terms of the source and methods. Given the variability of the sources of data, different methods are used for each data source in order to arrive at country estimates that are comparable and permit regional and global aggregation.

Infant mortality rate is the total number of infants dying before reaching the age of one year per 1,000 live births in a given year. It is an approximation of the number of deaths per 1,000 children born alive who die within one year of birth.

Estimates and projections of the infant mortality rate are prepared every two years by the Population Division of the United Nations Secretariat from data compiled by the Population Division and Statistics Division from national statistical sources. The best source of data to compute the infant mortality rate is a civil registration system covering at least 90 percent of births and deaths in a country or area. As many developing countries lack complete and reliable statistics of births and deaths based on civil registration, various estimation techniques are used to calculate the indicator from population censuses and demographic surveys.