Globally, infectious diseases, including pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria, remain a leading cause of under-five deaths, along with preterm birth and intrapartum-related complications. Despite strong advances in fighting childhood illnesses, infectious diseases, which disproportionately effect children in poorer settings, remain highly prevalent, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Due to growing child populations and a shift of the population distribution towards high-mortality regions, the share of global under-five deaths that occurred in sub-Saharan Africa increased from 31 per cent in 1990 to 53 per cent in 2019 and is expected to increase even further in the next few decades.Įnding preventable child deaths worldwide will require targeted interventions to the age-specific causes of death among children. Approximately 82 per cent of all under-five deaths in the world in 2019 occurred in just two regions: sub-Saharan Africa (53 per cent) and South Asia (27 per cent). With shifting demographics, the burden of child deaths is heaviest in sub-Saharan Africa.
Disparities in child survival abound at the country level as well, where the risk of dying before age five for a child born in the highest mortality country is about 70 times higher than in the lowest mortality country, and all five countries with mortality rates above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births are in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2019, 1 in 13 children in sub-Saharan Africa died before reaching their fifth birthday-15 times higher than the risk for children born in high-income countries and 20 years behind the world average, which achieved a 1 in 13 rate by 1999. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the region with the highest under-five mortality rate in the world-76 deaths per 1,000 live births. Among all countries, 44 per cent (85) cut their under-five mortality by at least two-thirds over this same period – 34 of them are low- or lower-middle-income countries, indicating that, while the burden of child mortality is unevenly distributed throughout the world, improving child survival is possible even in resource-constrained settings.Ĭhildren continue to face widespread regional and income disparities in their chances of survival. Most regions in the world and 149 out of 195 countries at least halved their under-five mortality rate from 1990 to 2019. In 2019 alone, roughly 14,000 under-five deaths occurred every day, an intolerably high number of largely preventable child deaths. Despite this considerable progress, improving child survival remains a matter of urgent concern. The global under-five mortality rate declined by 59 per cent, from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 38 in 2019.
Despite the global progress in reducing child mortality rates over the past few decades, an estimated 5.2 million children under age five died in 2019-more than half of those deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, progress in reducing child mortality rates has been accelerated in the 2000–2019 period compared with the 1990s, with the annual rate of reduction in the global under-five mortality rate increasing from 1.9 per cent in 1990–1999 to 3.7 per cent in 2000–2019. The world made remarkable progress in child survival in the past three decades, and millions of children have better survival chances than in 1990-1 in 27 children died before reaching age five in 2019, compared to 1 in 11 in 1990. Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.
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