Ethiopia, Malawi and Tanzania have all been successful in reducing the rate of under-five mortality since 1990, according to a report by the A Promise Renewed campaign. Although the findings are encouraging, it does also reveal that much more work still needs to be done.
Compiled by the UN children’s fund Unicef, the World Health Organisation, and the World Bank Group, the report also estimates that the total number of children under-five dying in the world almost halved from 12.6 million in 1990 to 6.6 million in 2012. The most successful regions were Eastern and Southern Africa which achieved an annual reduction of 5.3% in recent years, the largest in the world.
Ethiopia
Ten years of Ethiopian government investment has funded over 36,000 health workers in more than 15,000 locations across the country which led to an impressive 40% fall in child mortality since 1990. These new facilities have been used for a national measles immunization campaign and the distribution of insecticide-treated mosquito nets to over 10 million families.
Tanzania
The child mortality rate in Tanzania has fallen from 1,000 to 578 in every 100,000 since the introduction of the MDGs 13 years ago. This is, in part, due to a particular focus on maternal health which led to a 47% reduction in deaths during the first 24 hours of life. But, because the MDG rating is retrospectively measured from 1990 rather than 2000, Tanzania’s twenty-year average is misleading as the child mortality rate did not begin to improve until the mid-1990s.
Malawi
The success of Malawian President Joyce Banda in tackling the causes of child mortality have been particularly notable. In the report, her country boasted a decrese of 5.6% which represents the second largest reduction amongst low-income states behind Bangladesh with 5.7%.
The issues of maternal and infant health have come to define her presidency and, during her time in office, the under-five mortality rate fell from 112 per 1,000 in 2010 to 71 per 1,000 in 2012.
The Future
In coming years, other African countries hope to replicate the successes of these countries by introducing similar programmes. In Zambia, nutrition and immunization schemes aim to save more than 26,000 children each year and pre-packaged kits to prevent, diagnose and treat multiple diseases could save half a million children by 2015 in the Democratic Republic of Congo
While the massive reductions in child mortality are undoubtedly cause for celebration, the staggering global disparity in these statistics prove that these programmes must be expanded. While children under five in sub-Saharan Africa are 14 times more likely to die than those in the United States, it should not be forgotten that even one child dying of preventable disease is one too many.
Originally published on the Urban Times.
