Dagedonn/Marternal-Child-Health-Nigeria

# Maternal & Child Health Disparities Across Nigerian States **Reducing 8 correlated health indicators to 3 principal components and clustering 37 states (36 + FCT) using PCA + K-Means on 2023–2024 NDHS data.** ## The Finding Access to care doesn't guarantee good outcomes. One cluster of states has relatively strong antenatal care attendance — yet the **highest childhood fever prevalence** of any group. Getting women into a clinic isn't the same as protecting child health once they're home. That distinction matters for how health budgets get allocated, and it's the kind of pattern you only see by analyzing indicators together instead of one at a time. ## Problem Nigeria's maternal and child health indicators — ANC visits, skilled birth attendance, facility delivery, contraceptive use, stunting, wasting, underweight, fever — are usually reported one at a time. That misses how they interact, and it gives policymakers no clean way to group states by shared need. **Question:** Which Nigerian states share similar maternal and child health profiles, and what actually drives the differences between them? ## Data - **Source:** Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS) 2023–2024, Women's Recode (IR) and Children's Recode (KR) files - **Raw scale:** 39,050 women × 6,411 variables (IR), 27,783 children × 1,331 variables (KR) - **Final analysis dataset:** 37 states × 8 indicators, aggregated from individual-level survey responses | Indicator | Definition | |---|---| | ANC 4+ | % women with ≥4 antenatal visits | | Skilled Birth Attendance | % births assisted by doctor/nurse/midwife | | Facility Delivery | % births in a recognized health facility | | Modern FP | % women using modern contraception | | Stunting | % children with height-for-age < -2 SD | | Wasting | % children with weight-for-height < -2 SD | | Underweight | % children with weight-for-age < -2 SD | | Fever | % children with recent fever | ## Method 1. **Indicator construction** — recoded raw DHS variab …