Children born in Africa are at highest risk of childhood death, data shows
Data from the United Nations Children’s fund (UNICEF) has found that children born in Kenya and the rest of the Sub-Saharan Africa are at highest risk of childhood death in the world.
According to the data, Kenyan children are 15 times more at risk of death than children in Europe and Northern America and 19 times more at risk than children in Australia and New Zealand.
In November last year, the Ministry of Health had however showed that the infant mortality rate in the country reduced by 32.9 deaths per 1,000 live births from 34.056 deaths per 1000 live births in 2020.
MoH, also revealed that introduction of new childhood vaccines such as pneumococcal and rotavirus combined with the use of insecticide- treated mosquito nets and the increase of skilled birth attendants also contributed to the reduction of children deaths.
While officially releasing the 2022 UNICEF child mortality report earlier this week, the United Nations Inter Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UNIGME) projected that globally, five million children died before their fifth birthday and another 2.1 million children and youth aged between 5 and 24 years died in 2021.
“Far too many parents are facing the trauma of losing their children, sometimes before they take their first breath,” UNICEF Director of the Division of Data Analyics, Planning and Monitoring Vidhya Ganesh said.
According to her, such widespread, preventable tragedy should never be accepted as inevitable.
The risk of a woman having a stillbirth in Sub Saharan Africa is seven times more than in Europe and North America.
Reports led by UN agencies Unicef and the World Health Organisation (WHO) found vast inequalities between regions, with children in the Sahel at a far higher risk of early death than anywhere else.
According to UN data, 2.7 million children in Sub Saharan Africa died before reaching their fifth birthday in 2020, representing 54 per cent of all deaths globally of children aged under five.
South Asia accounted for 27 per cent of those deaths in 2020 as both regions continue to face the steepest odds of survival in the world.
