Photo by www.unicef.org
Last month, UNICEF announced that the child mortality rate has dropped substantially. The new estimates are published in the 2011 report Levels & Trends in Child Mortality, issued by the UN Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (IGME), which is led by UNICEF and the WHO with participation from the World Bank and the UN Population Division. According to the report, the number of children under five dying each year declined from more than 12 million in 1990 to 7.6 million in 2010. Between 1990 and 2010, the under-five mortality rate dropped by more than one-third, from 88 deaths per 1,000 live births to 57.
“The news that the rate of child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa is declining twice as fast as it was a decade ago shows that we can make progress even in the poorest places, but we cannot for a moment forget the chilling fact of around 21,000 children dying every day from preventable causes,” said Anthony Lake, UNICEF Executive Director. “Focusing greater investment on the most disadvantaged communities will help us save more children’s lives, more quickly and more cost effectively (UNICEF).”
While the drop is significant and cause to celebrate that international incentives are having a clear impact, it is somewhat short-lived. While the numbers show progress, the rate at which it is being achieved is significantly slow and will not be on target to to meet Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG4), which calls for a two-thirds reduction in the under-five mortality rate by 2015. Therefore despite this success, some 21,000 children continue to die each day from preventable causes; until that number reaches zero, children will die needlessly.
