Evolution of Infant Mortality in Ecuador: A Spatial Analysis From 2010 to 2019

The health situation of children is fundamental for the big picture of public health in a country. Particularly, the death of children under one year of age, calculated through the infant mortality rate is still a key indicator, especially in Latin America where the overall rate has been constantly decreasing down to 13.9 infant deaths per 1000 live births. But this global figure encompasses geographical and temporal disparities within the same country. This is why it is interesting to analyze this evolution through a geomatic method of spatial prioritization. By combining hotspots detection (Local Indicators of Spatial Association, LISA) and time trend over 20 years (Mann-Kendall) at municipal level data from Ecuador, a country with infant mortality similar to the regional average, we obtain the most critical townships that should receive special attention with respect to maternal and infant health.