Reducing child mortality is one of humanity's most important achievements. Countries around the world have dramatically reduced infant mortality rates. I think we should celebrate this extraordinary achievement and use it as encouragement to further reduce child mortality.
But celebrating something can seem difficult do not have Happening. So I wanted to turn things around. Rather than focusing on the lack of child deaths, I would like to focus on the people who are here today because of advances in global health.
I'm asking a simple question to make visible the millions of lives saved by advances in global health. How many more children would have died if global infant mortality rates had not fallen?
To answer this question, you need to choose a baseline. Let's start in 1990. If we had gone further back in time, this number would have been even higher, as child mortality rates were much higher in the past.
The answer is shown in the graph. A generation ago, in 1990, the global infant mortality rate was 9.3%. The dashed purple line shows the number of children who would have died if the mortality rate had remained constant. More than 12 million children would have died each year.
The actual number of children dying has fallen to 5 million a year. This is indicated by the dark red line. This was achieved as the global child mortality rate fell to 3.7% in 2021.
The difference between the two lines shows how many more children would have died if the world had made no progress. In total, an additional 132 million children died in his 31 years.1
So, thanks to advances in global health since 1990, there are 132 million more people alive in the world today.
