At the end of this year, the targets set by the United Nations in 2000 for developing countries will expire. In this project, we take those eight Millennium Development Goals and examine how some communities in the United States measure up. We have applied each goal to the U.S. by looking at an indicator used to measure a country’s development success and interpreting it for a specific community in America. The eight goals are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability, and develop a global partnership for development. In this piece, we look at why infant mortality is so high in Mississippi.

In the tiny town of Hollandale, in the Mississippi Delta, mother Jamekia Howard sat in her living room and solemnly flipped through photographs of two of her children.

Later Howard, a 31-year-old social worker, pointed to graves marked by small metal signs in the Sanders Garden Memorial, where her babies were buried. The cemetery, just a short drive from her house, serves most of the black families in her Washington County town.

“I go visit them all the time,” she said.

Both of Howard’s babies died before they turned 1. She lost her boy De Terrance to a birth defect that left him without an esophagus, when he was just 1 month old. Her daughter Fremya was a stillborn two years later, in 2004. Both were premature, she said.

Since Howard lost her babies, the infant mortality rate has improved in Mississippi. Over the past five years, the number of babies dying before their first birthday has declined by 15 percent.

But at 8.2 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the U.S., which has a national average of 5.9 deaths per 1,000 live births, and black infants are nearly twice as likely to die as white babies.

In fact, if Mississippi were a country, it would fare worse this year in infant death than Lebanon — considered a developing country by the United Nations — or Bosnia, dubbed an “economy in transition,” according to estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency.

There isn’t one clear explanation, but health experts have noticed some trends. According to a 2015 report on infant mortality by the Mississippi Department of Health, mothers’ health before and during pregnancy is one of the biggest contributing factors to infant deaths.