For instance, in Bolivia and Turkey, mortality rates among children under five years can be four times higher among the poorest children compared to the richest children. Further, on average, below 40 percent of the poorest children are fully immunized compared to nearly 70 percent of children from the richest households in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. The report on Nicaragua shows that in the course of her lifetime, an average poor woman in that country will have more than six children, whereas an average Nicaraguan rich woman will have fewer than two. Another report says a poor Indonesian teenage girl is five times as likely to bear a child as a rich teenage girl. These reports represent a significant departure from the common practices in compiling health data.
Most data presently used for policy purposes cover entire national or regional populations.
Because they cover rich as well as poor sections of the population, such data give a very misleading picture of conditions that prevail among the poor groups, and they do not reflect rich-poor disparities. These new reports fill this gap by providing differentiated information for roughly 30 indicators of health, nutrition and population status and service for each 20 percent of a country's population, defined in terms of household wealth. The tabulations use Demographic and Health Surveys data and are available for 44 countries spread over the Bank's regions. Since tabulations have been calculated from the same data source for multiple countries, it is possible for the first time to systematically compare performance across and within countries. The data also confirm that the extent of inequalities varies tremendously.