An index of education and child health in the Horn of Africa

Abstract

Synthetic indicators are intended to provide an overview of the situation of individuals in a community in relation to a concept to be studied such as quality of life. This study aims to propose a territorial measure and classification of education and child health for countries of the Horn of Africa based on the criteria set out in the United Nations Declaration of the Millennium Development Goals. We construct a synthetic indicator from a multidimensional approach taking into account a large number of variables defined in the Millennium Declaration. For this purpose, we use the Pena distance method for the year 2010, which is the latest year for which data is available. We believe that the situation of the countries in the Horn of Africa differ with respect to the Millennium Development Goal indicators for education and child health. The most striking differences relate to basic quality of life variables.