I’ve been thinking about what I wrote yesterday about the drop in percentage of population who are over 15 compared to the under 15s. Liberia has a very high under 5s mortality rate and it is probably that that skews the chart so heavily. In the UK, our under 5s mortality rate (expressed as the number of children under 5 dying per 1000 live births) is very similar to our infant mortality rate (number of under 1s dying per 1000 live births). ie. if you survive till your first birthday in the UK, the likelihood is that you will survive till your 5th. Not so in countries like Liberia and Cameroon. Take a look at the table below (2017 data from UNICEF). All forms of childhood mortality are expressed as the number dying per 1000 live births:
| COUNTRY | NEONATAL MORTALITY |
INFANT MORTALITY |
UNDER 5 MORTALITY
|
| UK | 2.6 | 3.7 | 4.3 |
| CAMEROON | 25.5 | 55.1 | 84 |
| LIBERIA | 25.1 | 55.9 | 74.7 |
Many children die between the ages of 1 and 5 in low income (eg. Liberia) and lower middle income (eg. Cameroon) countries (World Bank classification according to GNI (more on this tomorrow I think)). Actually, according to UNICEF statistics (https://www.unicef.org/liberia/children.html), Liberia has done rather well recently in reducing under-five child deaths, from 241 to 78 per 1,000 live births between 1990 and 2011. This is great but still means there’s a long way to go before the UN’s sustainable development goal (SDG) of 25 per 1,000 by 2030 is achieved (https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/health/).
The SDG neonatal mortality goal which is what NICHE International is all about is “at least as low as 12 per 1,000 live births” worldwide. Take a look at my table above again. We have some work to do.