Women outlive men by almost 8 years: Census Result...

Women outlive men by almost 8 years: Census Results

Women have a 7.10 year life expectancy over men at 68 years, the Zimbabwe 2022 Population and Housing Census preliminary report of Mortality and Orphanhood has revealed. Zimbabwean males can expect to live up to 61.2 years on average.

At 64.7 years, life expectancy is now at its highest since 1960 according to World Bank year on year statistics on the country. Life expectancy was at 61.49 years in 2019. At its lowest in the period it was at 43.06 in 2004.

Meanwhile majority of Zimbabwean deaths are going unregistered.

“A total of 121,078 deaths were reported and of these, 41.4% percent (50,141) were registered,” reads the report from the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency.

An official with the Registrar General’s office said that reasons for non-registration of death are multiple:

“One reason could be that there is no affected survivor who needs the death certificate. Also if the deceased has no estate like pension pay outs, or a house, few people will bother to register the deaths. In other cases, it is because the deceased was undocumented or the survivors are the undocumented ones,” said the official.

The Registrar General’s office carried out a countrywide exercise to enable easier access for documentation and issued over 1 million documents including death certificates.

The 121,078 deaths give a Crude Death Rate of 8.0 deaths per 1,000 persons.

Maternal deaths are at 0.363 percent with Mashonaland Central having the lowest rates at 0.293.

“A total of 1,589 maternal deaths were reported against 437,478 live births giving a national Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) of 363 per 100,000 live births,” the report says.

11.1 for Harare province. Under 5 Mortality Rate for Manicaland province was 50.9 and 41.6 for Masvingo province (Table 3).