Paper short abstract:

This study aims to highlight the adult mortality trends in sub-Saharan Africa under the prism of adult modal age at death, a key indicator of longevity which refers to the age at which deaths are more concentrated at adult ages.

Paper long abstract:

This study aims to highlight the adult mortality trends in sub-Saharan Africa under the prism of adult modal age at death, a key indicator of longevity which refers to the age at which deaths are more concentrated at adult ages.

In sub-Saharan African countries lack reliable vital statistics, but many censuses and national representative surveys that addressed maternal and children health have been carried out in most of these countries. In addition, other sub-population surveys were carried out in some of them. But these data sources were gathered by the United Nations Population Division and make them produce various mortality measures such as child (5q0) and adult mortality (45q15) for many years. On the other hand, many relational models have been developed to improve mortality estimation in countries lacking reliable vital registration systems. But the state of the art of these models remains indirect methods indexed by one or several mortality measures (1q0, 5q0, 45q15, e0). The most interesting of them remains the age-specific model that is HIV calibrated. This model is the more suited for many sub-Saharan African countries strongly affected by HIV, and make it possible to take into account the HIV effect on longevity.

Specifically, two main research questions underlay this paper. The first is to know the ages at which adult deaths are concentrated in 44 sub-Saharan African countries from 1990 to 2015. The second question seeks to assess the effect of HIV on adult longevity.