Reducing child mortality

Child mortality refers to the probability of dying between birth and age 5, expressed per 1,000 live births. The term under-five mortality is also used.

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.

The reduction of infant and child mortality is expected to remain the first priority concern of most individual UNICEF country programmes. Support for accelerating immunization and oral rehydration therapy (ORT) remains an essential element of these programmes. Although it remains difficult to estimate the number of infant and child lives saved as a result of the actions advocated by UNICEF since the early 1980s, WHO estimates that the deaths of between 750,000 and 1 million children under five years of age are already being averted each year owing to the increase of such therapy and that at least 1.5 million deaths were averted during 1988 through a programme of universal child immunization (UCI). It has been estimated that through ORT, water and sanitation and other health and nutrition measures undertaken by UN agencies, child mortality rates in the developing countries have been halved since 1960, increasing the average life expectancy from 37 to 67 years.

Advances in income and education have allowed households almost everywhere in the world to improve their health. In the 1980s, even in countries in which average incomes fell, death rates of children under age 5 declined by almost 30%. But the child mortality rate fell more than twice as much in countries in which average incomes rose by more than 1% a year.

BASICS (Basic Support for Institutionalizing Child Survival) provides both technical leadership and practical field programs for reducing infant and childhood illness and death worldwide. The project operates programs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and in the New Independent States (NIS). BASICS provides these countries with cost-effective child survival interventions and serves as a technical resource to those around the globe who design and implement child survival health programs. The project also collaborates with a wide range of nongovernmental organizations, other donors, and public health institutions in the following six programmatic areas: (1) sustaining immunization programs; (2) integrating effective case management of childhood illnesses; (3) strengthening the link between nutrition and health; (4) promoting techniques for monitoring and evaluation; (5) improving techniques for monitoring and evaluation; and (6) establishing public/private partnerships.