Although the number of children globally who died before their fifth birthday dropped to a record low of 4.9m in 2022, that still represents one death every six seconds, according to a newly released United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) report.
While the mortality rate for under-fives has roughly halved since 2000, the world is behind in the goal of reducing preventable deaths in that age group by 2030, and progress has slowed since 2015, it said.
The numbers represent “an important milestone”, said Juan Pablo Uribe, director for health nutrition and population at the World Bank, one of the partners that compiled the report alongside Unicef, the UN population division and the World Health Organisation.
“But this is simply not enough.”
The picture is varied, reports Reuters. Some countries, like Cambodia, Malawi and Mongolia, have reduced under-five mortality rates by more than 75% since 2000.
Overall, deaths in babies and children under-five in 2022 were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which represented 57% of the global total, despite only making up 30% of the live births that year.
The report estimated that the mortality risk for under-fives in sub-Saharan Africa is 18 times as high as the risk in Australia and New Zealand.
Southern Asia had around a quarter of deaths and live births. Around half the deaths globally are among newborns, the report said.
The report was limited by a lack of data in the worst-affected countries, the UN partners said.
The deaths were largely caused by preventable or treatable causes, like pre-term birth, pneumonia or diarrhoea, and better access to primary healthcare and community health workers could vastly improve the outlook, the UN said, though climate change, increasing inequity, conflict and the long-term fall-out of Covid-19 could all threaten progress.
UN-IGME-2023-Child-Mortality-Report
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