Do Health Nongovernmental Organizations Improve Child Mortality? A Cross-National Analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa

There is an extensive debate pertaining to the ability of health nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to improve health in sub-Saharan Africa. We evaluate this debate in this article by examining the impact of health nongovernmental organizations on child mortality from 1990 to 2005 for a sample of twenty-nine sub-Saharan African countries using two-way fixed-effects regression models. The results indicate that higher levels of health NGOs per capita in a sub-Saharan African country correspond to lower levels of child mortality. We also find that a number of other factors affect child mortality, including debt service, multinational corporate investment, gross domestic product per capita, secondary school enrollments, malnutrition prevalence, fertility, and human immunodeficiency virus prevalence.