Can religion kill? The association between membership of the Apostolic faith and child mortality in Zimbabwe


Submitted: 16 May 2017
Accepted: 5 July 2018
Published: 1 October 2018
Abstract Views: 953
PDF: 527
HTML: 25
Publisher's note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Authors

Existing literature has been equivocal about the effect of religion on utilization of health service and health outcomes. While followers of particularized theology hypothesis believe that doctrinal teachings, beliefs and values of religious groups directly influence health access and outcomes, the advocates of the selectivity hypothesis claim that the observed disparities between religious groups mainly reflect differential access to social and human capital which in turn determines health access and outcome rather than religion per se. Using household data from the Zimbabwe Multiple Indicator Monitoring Survey 2009, we find that household heads’ affiliation with apostolic faith put children under five years old at greater risk of death compared to other religious groups. This effect remains strong even after controlling for a wide range of socio-economic and demographics characteristics of the households in multivariate logit regressions.


Stanley Gwavuya, UNICEF Pacific, Suva

Social Policy Specialist

Head: Policy, Evidence and social Protection

UNICEF Fiji

Supporting Agencies

UNICEF

Ha, W., Gwavuya, S., & Salama, P. (2018). Can religion kill? The association between membership of the Apostolic faith and child mortality in Zimbabwe. Journal of Public Health in Africa, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.4081/jphia.2018.707

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Citations