Research project: High resolution global mapping of women of childbearing age, pregnancies and births for Zika burden estimation - Dormant

Start date: 1/9/2016
End date: 31/05/2019

Estimates of the number of births and pregnancies for 2015 were produced for countries following the methodology described in James et al., In summary, this was achieved by identifying the women of childbearing age (WOBCA) from a gridded population map for each country and using age and sex census or UN data, grouped into seven 5-year groupings from 15 to 49 years of age. Birth counts were then estimated using age specific fertility rates. These were then multiplied with the WOBCA gridded data, for each age group, before summing, to estimate the total number of births. Finally, for each country, the distribution was scaled to match the UN national estimated births for 2015. Pregnancy estimates were further derived using data from the Guttmacher institute on stillbirths, miscarriages, and abortions, to calculate a pregnancies to births ratio, before applying it to the birth estimates to generate numbers of pregnancies.