WEB DESK
Bangladesh has registered a sharp decline of over 75 percent in the under-5 child mortality rate since 1990, says the just released report prepared at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on behalf of the United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME).
This decline outpaces the global decline of 59 percent recorded over the same period. Calling it a ‘remarkable achievement’ the report says that the progress in reduction of under-5 death rate in lower income and lower middle income countries like Bangladesh shows that mortality reduction is possible under varying economic settings.
In 1990, the under-5 child mortality rate was 146 per thousand live births which declined to 86 in 2000 and 27 in 2021 which works out to be 5.4 percent annual decline in the under-5 child mortality rate consistently over 3 decades. The infant mortality rate also declined from 101 deaths per thousand live births in 1990 to 23 deaths per thousand live births in 2021.
The report says that in 2021, 5 million children died before turning 5 years old as they were deprived of basic health care, vaccination and proper food. During the same period an estimated 2.1 million children, adolescents and youth aged 5-24 years died in the world. The report shows that more children and youth died in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia than all other regions in 2021.