Child Mortality – The good news and the bad news

The good news: child mortality has fallen in every single country over the past few decades. 4 million fewer children died before their fifth birthday in 2015 than in the year 2000.

The bad news: according to a detailed study published in The Lancet,

despite remarkable progress in the improvement of child survival between 1990 and 2015, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 target of a two-thirds reduction of under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) was not achieved globally.

In other words, more than 60% of the world’s child deaths occur in just 10 countries…

According to the WEF, the world has made enormous strides in reducing child deaths, cutting the under-five mortality rate by more than half (53%) between 1990 and 2015. But there’s still much more to be done, and this achievement fell short of the Millennium Development Goal target of cutting the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds.

Estimates suggest that 5.9 million children under five died last year, including 2.7 million newborns. More than 60% of these deaths happened in just 10 countries in Africa and Asia: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, China, Angola, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Tanzania.

Links

• Global, regional, and national causes of under-5 mortality in 2000–15: The Lancet

• World Economic Forum – Winning the war on Child Mortality

• Millennium Goals – United Nations

• Sustainable Development Goals – United Nations