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Sources:

Estimated maternal mortality ratio
World Health Organization, United Nations Children's Fund and United Nations Population Fund, Maternal mortality in 2005: Estimates developed by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA and the World Bank (accessed June 2009).

Infant mortality rate
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2009), World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision. CD-ROM Edition; supplemented by official national statistics published in United Nations Demographic Yearbook 2006, available from the United Nations Statistics Division website, http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/default.htm (accessed June 2009); 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 2009).

Footnotes:

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Technical notes:

Maternal mortality ratio is defined as the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in a given year. Maternal deaths are defined as those caused by deliveries and complications of pregnancy, child-birth and the puerperium. However, the exact definition varies from source to source and is not always clear in the original, particularly as regards the inclusion of abortion-related deaths.

Furthermore, the World Health Organization observes that most maternal deaths go unregistered in areas where maternal mortality rates are highest. To address this information gap, WHO and the United Nations Children's Fund developed the above estimates of maternal mortality using a dual strategy. The strategy involved: (1) using available data, wherever possible, adjusted to account for under-reporting and misclassification of maternal deaths, and (2) developing a simple model to predict values for countries with no reliable national data. The estimates derived from this approach are considered to be more reliable than earlier ones and are the ones shown here.

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.