Skip to content

Under-five child mortality

This page describes the methodology and data used for the under-five child mortality data story produced by ONE Data. You can read the story here.

About the data

Child mortality figures in this data story are from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), the joint estimates produced by UNICEF, WHO, the World Bank and the UN Population Division, unless noted otherwise. "Child mortality" and "Under 5 mortality" refer to the probability of dying before age five, expressed as the number of deaths per 1,000 live births. Only the median value of the estimations was taken into account. Global and country rates run through 2024, the latest available.

Estimates of child mortality rates for countries, world and subregions between 1950 and 1989 are extracted from the UN Population Data Portal (UN Pop). Historical rates before 1950 are modelled estimates from Gapminder's child mortality series (GD005 version 11), compiled from demographic research, and carry wide uncertainty.

Cause of death data in this story are extracted from the UN IGME Portal. The estimations are from the Child and Adolescent Causes of Death Estimation (CA CODE) group, a research collaboration of academic institutions, WHO, and UNICEF. CA CODE estimates are modelled combining empirical cause-of-death data (from systematic reviews and country studies) with a statistical approach to fill gaps where direct reporting is unavailable or incomplete, and are harmonized with UN IGME's all-cause mortality totals. Estimates are reviewed by WHO Member States through country consultation. Cause-specific figures are expressed as the fraction of under-five deaths attributable to each cause, not as absolute numbers or rates.

The number of births per year comes from UN World Population Prospects 2024.

When cited, Income levels of countries are defined according to the 2024 World Bank classification. Ethiopia and Venezuela lacked a classification for 2024. Venezuela was removed from the dataset because it was missing a classification continuously since 2021, while Ethiopia was flagged as Low income, consistent with both earlier and more recent World Bank assessments.

The estimate that vaccines have saved 154 million lives over the past 50 years is drawn from previous ONE Data analysis, Vaccines are a modern-day miracle. Figures on specific programmes and prices come from the named organisations: Gavi and UNICEF (malaria vaccine pricing), Africa CDC (vaccine manufacturing targets), and national health ministries (Rwanda DHS for Community Health Workers and Ethiopia DHS for salaried health extension workers).

The possible solutions for preventable deaths are quoted from Unicef (Newborn Health Innovations), The Borgen Project (3 Inventions Saving Babies in Developing Countries) and Center for Global Development.

All ratios and comparisons in the text are ONE's calculations from these sources. Data as of September 2026.

Data pack

The full dataset used to produce the charts in this story, organized by chart and including source, year and country-level detail, is available here.

Ratios and comparisons

The stall in the decline in the number of deaths in 2015 refers to a reduction in the annual rate of decline from 3.9% to approximately 1.5%, according to UN IGME data.

For all IGME values we considered the median estimate for the considered year and country.

  • A child in Chad is about 39 times more likely to die before his fifth birthday than a child in Norway:
    • Norway: 2.49 deaths for 1,000 live births in 2024 (UN IGME)
    • Chad: 97.26 deaths for 1,000 live births in 2024 (UN IGME)
  • Rwanda: 79% mortality drop between 2000 and 2024
    • 184.16 deaths for 1,000 live births in 2000 (UN IGME)
    • 37.74 deaths for 1,000 live births in 2024 (UN IGME)
  • Ethiopia: 68% mortality drop between 2000 and 2024
    • 140.13 deaths for 1,000 live births in 2000 (UN IGME)
    • 44.50 deaths for 1,000 live births in 2024 (UN IGME)
  • Sub-Saharan Africa now accounts for around 58% of the world's child deaths
    • n° of SSA deaths in 2024: 2,830,392 (UN IGME)
    • n° of Global deaths: 4,857,797 (UN IGME)

For historical data:

  • In 1800, more than two in five newborns worldwide died before the age of five
    • Mortality rate in 1800: 428 every 1000 live births (Gapminder)
  • In 1950, nearly one child in four died before their fifth birthday.
    • Mortality rate in 1950: 227.19 every 1000 live births (UN Pop)
  • In 1990, only one child in 11 died
    • Mortality rate in 1990: 93.52 every 1000 live births (UN IGME)
  • By 2024, only one in 27
    • Mortality rate in 2024: 37.37 every 1000 live births (UN IGME)