Tracking Botswana’s Future Progress towards Achieving Substantial Reduction of Under Five Mortality By 2030

This study uses annual time series data on under five mortality rate (U5MR) for Botswana from 1960 to 2020 to predict future trends of U5MR over the period 2021 to 2030. Residuals and forecast evaluation statistics indicate that the applied Holt’s linear method is stable in forecasting U5MR in Botswana. Optimal values of smoothing constants α and β are 0.9 and 0.3 respectively based on minimum MSE. The exponential smoothing model projections suggest that annual U5MR will decline over the out of sample period. Therefore, we encourage the government of Botswana to channel more resources to Maternal and child health (MNCH) program activities in order to substantially reduce under five mortality to levels as low as 25 deaths per 1000 live births by 2030.