2023 Under 5 Child Mortality
The UN's updated 2023 child mortality figures are out. The visualisation below1 shows this data, where each square represents ~10,000 deaths. The entire image represents a total of 4.8 million under-5 deaths. You can see the original source data and review from this link.
The biggest reductions from last year are:
Central African Republic - 75,000 fewer deaths
India - 33,000
Somalia - 29,000
Nigeria - 17,000
Pakistan - 11,000
China - 11,000
You can see how this compares to 2003 and 2013 below, although this visualisation was made at the time using older data and newer data has revisions for previous years, so the country data may not match, but should be roughly similar.
Some key points from the UN’s report on the data from 2023:
52% decrease in under-five mortality rate but the rate of progress is slowing
Before 2020, there was usually a yearly decrease of ~200,000 deaths per year
Then it was
2020 - 217,000
2021 - 154,000
2022 - 52, 000
2023 - 221,000
So it looks like progress did slow down during Covid, but is now on a similar trend to before, you can see this below
An estimated 4.8 million children died before the age of five, with 2.3 million of those being newborns. These deaths are largely preventable
Countries classified as fragile and conflict-affected accounted for just a quarter of all live births but nearly half of all under-five deaths
Since 2000, deaths among children aged 1–59 months have fallen by 58 per cent, compared to a 44 per cent decline in neonatal deaths
Using Google Sheets