The Relation Between the Mortality Rate, Pib Per Capita and Human Development Index

What first brought our attention into this topic was the new Netflix´s documentary that was released on September 20, Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates. Bill and Melinda Gates came across disturbing results relatively to the number of deaths regarding the lack of sanitation in under-developed countries. They state that half of the world´s population, 4,5 billion people, practice open defecation or use unsafe sanitation facilities and services. They realized how alarming was the fact that 829 000 people died from a disease like diarrhea, that in our eyes is just a common discomfort. Thus they created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in order to re-design the concept of sanitation and to make accessible to the third-world countries in a sustainable and affordable way. The impact this had on the viewers was nearly impossible to ignore, so we decided to deepen our study into this topic.

There were gathered interesting results by the World Bank Organization concerning the number of diseases since 1990 to the present day. The interpretation made from this results is that the number of people living with diseases or infections as risen since 1990, however the rate of the newly effected people has been decreasing. In the matter of the first result, the countries were developing and creating better conditions for its population, allowing them to have good health conditions. Regarding the second, later on we found out that this newly infected rate that was continually growing was due to Sub-Saharan Africa.

We wanted to understand if the deaths due to the poor sanitation, hygiene and water had some kind of relationship with the Human Development index or the PIB per capita of each country, meaning if there is any relationship between the richer and developed countries and the deaths due to this problems or in fact what is it´s relation with the poorer and under-develop countries.

We started by collection data from The World Bank, that gave us access to Mortality rate attributed to unsafe water, unsafe sanitation and lack of hygiene (per 100,000 population) and the PIB per capita, we collected all the data from the year 2016. We also used data from the Word Health Organization, Unicef and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation web site.