Child mortality and youth mortality are usually divided into two categories: children who die before their fifth birthday and those who die between the ages of 5 and 24.
The UN organization Unicef and others show in a report that an estimated five million children died before their fifth birthday in the measurement year 2021 and another 1.9 million children were stillborn during the measurement in the same year.
Efforts have been made to reduce child mortality, which was one of the hopes in the UN’s Millennium Goals until 2015 and in the subsequent global Agenda 2030.
Strong reductions
Positive progress is clearly visible: infant mortality among children under the age of five has decreased by 50 percent since the turn of the millennium.
Mortality among those counted as older children and young people fell by 36 percent and stillbirths by 35 percent since 2000.
Positive statistics and percentages have a basic and almost sad explanation in their simplicity: increased investment in primary care for women and children.
After 2010, the positive trend has been waning. “If the trend continues, 54 countries will not reach Agenda 2030 and the goals for sustainable development in terms of children under the age of five,” the report says.
Political will
“With stronger political will and targeted investments in fair access to primary care for every woman and child, we can turn the tide,” says Vidhya Ganesh, UNICEF’s director of data analysis, among other things, in a statement.
The situation has also been worsened by the covid pandemic, which severely strained, among other things, primary care in many countries – even though the pandemic did not directly affect child mortality.
The UN report singles out regions in Africa south of the Sahara and in South Asia as particularly vulnerable.