Refining Maternal Mortality Estimates for Brazil’s Indigenous Populations: A Novel Methodological Framework

Reduction of maternal mortality is part of the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed by UN country members. To this day, Brazil is still present high levels of maternal mortality rates, while compared to more developed countries. Knowing that indigenous are a vulnerable population in our country, the aim of this paper is to estimate maternal mortality rates to all self-declared indigenous groups in Brazil in 2010. We use 2010 population census and vital statistics as data sources. This census was the first research that has mortality information by indigenous groups, ethnicity and languages spoken. We estimate maternal mortality in the 137 Brazilian mesoregions, by combining parametric statistical models with formal demographic methods. Our results show that indigenous maternal mortality still show high levels even in recent periods.