Consistency of reports on orphanhood status: Insights from a linkage of individual records between successive censuses in southeastern Mali

Masquelier, Bruno [UCL] Hertrich, Véronique [Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques (INED)]

In countries with incomplete registration of deaths, estimates of adult mortality are frequently derived from reports on the survival of parents collected in censuses and surveys. These reports are also used to study health outcomes, schooling attainments and living arrangements of orphans, and to target communities in need of support programmes. They may be biased by the misclassification of fostered children as non-orphans, a problem referred to as the "adoption effect". In a rural area of south-eastern Mali, we compared reports on parental survival status collected in the last three national censuses (1987, 1998 and 2009) with data from an ongoing follow-up survey conducted in 7 villages and initiated in 1988, with a population estimated at 4400 in 2009. We evaluated how errors correlate with socio-demographic characteristics. The proportion of orphaned children is biased downwards, especially for fathers, but the adoption effect is lower than stated in the literature. There is a need to reconcile observed orphan prevalence with model-based estimates in Mali.