Year by year, a lot more small children are surviving

Few tragedies have been more commonplace and universal through human history than the deaths of small children. By the year 2000, much progress had been made all over the world in raising the survival rates of babies and toddlers.

That progress has continued. Since 2000 the number of children dying by age five has been cut in half.

The causes are attributed to the better nutrition (the “green revolution”), cleaner water, better sanitation, widespread vaccination, and mosquito nets. Sub-Saharan Africa still loses children at a far higher rate than in more prosperous regions, but both the problem and the progress have been most concentrated there.

One way of looking at the change is that in 1950, the share of children who died (nearly one in four) was similar to the share of those in the 85-90 year age bracket. By 2000, the rate for young children compared to adults between 75 and 80. Now they line up with those between 60 and 65. In other words, the dangers of newborns and the very young are increasingly becoming in line with everyone else’s – whose mortality rates are also dropping, if less dramatically.

Source: United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), Report 2025