Liberia

Population Growth, Fertility, and Health

Liberia has a high population growth rate of 2.75 percent, caused both by a high birth rate (42.9 births per 1,000 population) and net migration rate (5.1 migrants per 1,000 population: many are refugees of conflict in the neighboring Ivory Coast). The total fertility rate (an estimate of the number of children born to each woman) is extremely high: 5.8 children per woman. Because the population is predominantly young, the sex ratio is almost even at 0.99 males per 100 women, even in the oldest age group (65 years and older), where it is 0.94 males per 100 women. Life expectancy at birth is extremely low, due to the toll extracted by poverty, war and infectious diseases: 40.7 years for males and 43 years for females.

The standard of maternal and child health care in Liberia is quite low due to the country's poverty and destruction infrastructure during the civil wars. Childhood immunization rates are below 50 percent for some major diseases; only 6 percent of women use modern methods of contraception, and only 51 [Page 654]percent of births are attended by skilled personnel. The maternal mortality rate is estimated at 760 for 100,000 births, the stillbirth rate at 58 per 1,000 live births, and the neonatal mortality rate at 66 per 1,000 live births.

Save the Children, an international organization devoted to improving maternal and child health, places Liberia in its Tier III or least developed countries group: due to lack of available data, it could not be assigned a rank on either the Women's Index (which takes into account factors such as life expectancy, maternal mortality, availability of modern contraception, and maternity leave benefits) or the Mothers' Index (which takes into account additional factors related to children's health and well-being, such as the under-5 mortality rate, and gender parity in primary school enrollment). However, the country had low scores on many of the constituent statistics, which are factored into these indices.