An estimated 7 million children in Africa died before their fifth birthday, according to the latest estimates released by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME). The group also found that 1.9 million babies were stillborn in the same period. Many of these deaths could have been prevented with equitable access and high-quality maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health care.
“Every day, far too many parents are facing the trauma of losing their children, sometimes even before their first breath,” said Vidhya Ganesh, UNICEF Director of the Division of Data Analytics, Planning and Monitoring. “Such widespread, preventable tragedy should never be accepted as inevitable.”
The reports show that sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia shoulder the heaviest burden of child mortality, with sub-Saharan Africa having 29% of global live births, but accounting for 56% of all under-5 deaths in 2021 and southern Asia accounting for 26% of the total. Children born in sub-Saharan Africa are subject to the highest risk of childhood death in the world, 15 times higher than the risk for children in Europe and Northern America.
Mothers in these regions also endure the painful loss of babies to stillbirth at an exceptional rate, with 77% of all stillbirths in 2021 occurring in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia, nearly half of which happened in sub-Saharan Africa alone. The risk of a woman having a stillborn baby in sub-Saharan Africa is 7 times more likely than in Europe and Northern America.
“Behind these numbers are millions of children and families who are denied their basic rights to health,” said Juan Pablo Uribe, Global Director for Health, Nutrition and Population, World Bank, and Director of the Global Financing Facility. “We need political will and leadership for sustained financing for primary health care which is one of the best investments countries and development partners can make.”