Around 4.9 million children around the world will die before turning five in 2024, an alarming figure that includes 2.3 million newborns.
According to the new report Levels & Trends in Child Mortalityproduced by the United Nations Inter-Agency Group (UN IGME), the great tragedy lies in the fact that the majority of these deaths could have been avoided with low-cost interventions and access to basic health services.
Global Alert
Although the global panorama shows that deaths in this age group have fallen by more than half since the year 2000, the pace of this reduction has come to a sudden halt. Since 2015, the rate of decline in infant mortality has slowed by more than 60%, a warning sign for governments and international organizations.
Scenario in Brazil: historical progress and new challenges
In Brazil, however, the scenario presents historical advances that go against the direction of the most acute crises. In 2024, the country reached the lowest child and child rates in the last 34 years.
To give you an idea of the evolution, in 1990, 25 out of every thousand babies died before completing 28 days of life; today, that number has dropped to seven.
The probability of a child dying before their fifth birthday also fell from 63 to 14.2 deaths per thousand live births in the same period. This success is the result of structuring public policies, such as the Family Health Program and the expansion of the public health network, which have direct support from society and bodies such as Unicef.
The head of Health and Nutrition in Brazil, Luciana Phebo, highlights that these results represent thousands of lives that now have the chance to reach adulthood. “This change was possible because Brazil chose to invest in policies that work, such as vaccination and encouraging breastfeeding”, explains the expert.
However, she emphasizes that the country is not immune to loss of steam: between 2000 and 2009, newborn mortality fell by 4.9% per year, but this reduction rate fell to 3.16% in the last decade. The challenge now is to again accelerate efforts to reach populations where these policies do not yet reach them with the necessary effectiveness.
Malnutrition and geographic inequality
For the first time, the UN report integrates detailed causes of death and reveals the burden of severe acute malnutrition, which directly killed more than 100,000 children up to the age of five in 2024. The impact of hunger is even more profound indirectly, as it weakens the immune system against common diseases such as pneumonia and diarrhea.
Geographically, inequality is brutal: Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 58% of all in the world, while in South Asia the problem focuses on complications in the first month of life, such as premature birth and asphyxiation.
Unicef Executive Director Catherine Russell emphasizes that no child should die from preventable causes, especially at a time of global budget cuts. “History has shown what is possible when the world commits to protecting its children. With sustained investment and political will, we can continue to build on these advances,” says Russell.
Investment in child health
The report points out that investment in child health is one of the most cost-effective for global development, with returns of up to twenty dollars for every dollar invested, increasing productivity and strengthening economies in the long term.
The document also contains worrying data about adolescents and young people up to 24 years of age. In Brazil, the mortality profile in this age group is marked by violence, responsible for almost half of the deaths of boys between 15 and 19 years old.
Among girls of the same age, non-communicable diseases lead the causes of death, followed by violence and suicide.
Faced with this complex scenario, the report’s final recommendations are clear: it is necessary to make child survival an absolute political priority, focus on the regions most at risk and strengthen primary care systems so that progress not only continues, but regains the pace necessary to save millions of future lives.
