Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
Earlier this year, the UK’s Office for National Statistics announced that infant mortality rates in the UK had hit a record low. Britain’s Infant mortality rates (that is, deaths of children less that 1 year old) have decreased by 62% since 1981, from 11.1 deaths per 1000 live births, to just 4.2 deaths per 1000 in 2011. This is, of course, great news for the UK, and the drop has been attributed to a number of factors, including the control of infectious diseases and improvements in neonatal care.
But what about the wider picture? Child mortality continues to be a significant problem for many countries around the world, which is why the fourth Millennium Development Goal aims to tackle just this. This week we will look at which countries are most affected by high child mortality rates, and what the MDGs hope to do about it.
In view to reducing worldwide child mortality rates, the UN member states and various development organisations involved in implementing the MDGs have established this specific target: “Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the mortality rate of children under five.”
Most affected by high child death rates are the world’s poorest regions, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. Together these areas account for 81% of the total amount of child deaths worldwide (5.3 million out of 6.6 million).
Explaining the figures, a UN report elaborated: “The main killers are pneumonia, preterm birth complications, diarrhoea, intrapartum-related complications and malaria.” It added, “undernutrition contributes to 45 per cent of all under-five deaths. Children who are exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life are 14 times more likely to survive than non-breastfed children.”
Parental education also plays a key role, and children born to women with even just a primary school education are more likely to live beyond children than mothers who never went to school at all. This emphasizes the importance of Goal 2 of the MDGs (to achieve universal primary education), and shows how all the goals intermingle in the hope of improving living standards around the world.
Progress has already been made towards achieving the UN’s target for Goal 4. Since 1990, child mortality rates around the world have already decreased by 12.4 million, or 17, 000 few child deaths per day. An increased availability of vaccines has helped this success, with measles vaccines in particular helping to avoid the deaths of over 10 million children. But a lot more remains to be done. There is still much inequality around the world on this issue, with children born into poverty being still two times more at risk of child mortality than those born to families that are better off.
Different approaches to tackling this problem are being carried out worldwide, depending on local circumstances. In Chad, for example, where vaccination rates are some of the lowest worldwide, UNICEF has helped to roll out a successful immunization programme. Elsewhere, Indian families living in rural areas now increasingly have access to local heath centres, thanks to pioneering work by UNICEF and the state government.
For more information on what is being done around the world to achieve Goal 4, you can access the UN’s full report here.
