Sixty-nine million children under five will die from mostly preventable causes and 167 million children will live in poverty by 2030 unless the world focuses more on the plight of its most disadvantaged children, according to a UNICEF report released on Tuesday worldwide.
At current trends, the report styled “State of the World’s Children” projects, by 2030, sub-Saharan Africa will account for nearly half of the 69 million children who will die before their fifth birthday from mostly preventable causes although significant progress has been made in saving children’s lives, getting children into school and lifting people out of poverty.
Besides, the report paints a stark picture of what is in store for the world’s poorest children if governments, donors, businesses and international organizations do not accelerate efforts to address their needs.
“Denying hundreds of millions of children a fair chance in life does more than threaten their futures – by fueling intergenerational cycles of disadvantage, it imperils the future of their societies,” said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.
Global under-five mortality rates have been more than halved since 1990, boys and girls attend primary school in equal numbers in 129 countries, and the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide is almost half what it was in the 1990s, the report read.
But this progress has been neither even nor fair, the report said adding the poorest children are twice as likely to die before their fifth birthday and to be chronically malnourished than the richest.
Across much of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, children born to mothers with no education are almost 3 times more likely to die before they are 5 than those born to mothers with a secondary education.
