Using data available on the Gapminder data site, I examined the relationship between literacy rates in adult women (x-axis) and maternal mortality ratio (y-axis) from 1989 to 2009. Most countries cluster above an 80% literacy rate, with most of them belonging to Europe, and North and South America. Some countries do fall below that rate, and a majority of them are African countries with some Asian countries. The maternality mortality ratio appears to exponentially decrease when the literacy rate reaches above 80%. From 1989, almost all of the countries experienced a general decrease in maternal mortality and an increase in literacy rates. Though, there are a number of African countries that undergo a decrease in literacy rates and a decrease in maternal mortality as well.
With this, I am reminded of a section in Sen’s book that described how countries that suffered from a famine were always under a totalitarian style of government. Sen explained that the totalitarian government did not cause the famine to happen, but there was certainly a relationship between the two events. Seeing that I observed a decrease in maternal mortality regardless of changes to literacy rates for a large number of countries, I would assume that literacy rates do not have a direct influence on maternal mortality ratios, much like the totalitarian governments did not cause the faminies, though it is still interesting to see the relationship between the two variables over time. It seems like a bulk of the countries went through a decrease in maternal mortality and an increase in literacy rates, which are two very good trends. There are some African countries that have higher literacy rates than others, which speaks to a point that Hans Rosling made in his TedTalk about how there could be discrepancies within general communities. If I took an average of the literacy rates for all countries in Africa, it would probably show that an average of about 60% of adult females in Africa are literate. On surface level, this literacy rate is not horrible, it could be better, but it could also be so much worse. Then, when you break down the literacy rates in Africa by country, it becomes obvious that a concerning amount of African countries have an adult female literacy rate far below 60%.
While looking at this data is insightful, the major issues at hand cannot be ignored: several countries have an alarmingly high maternal mortality ratio, and several countries have an alarmingly low adult female literacy rate. It is imperative that the people who have the ability to rectify these afflictions do so immediately to the best of their abilities. Like Joshua Blumestock puts forward in his commentary on the use of data science in human development, this data is not just numbers, it is a terrible reality for people. As a society, we must do all that we can to use information from data to better the lives of our peers.