Maternal and Child Mortality
Millions of children and hundreds of thousands of mothers die each year from largely preventable causes.
Severity score
61.0
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Improving
What this is
Roughly 4.8 million children die before their fifth birthday each year and around 260,000 women die from pregnancy and childbirth complications, the overwhelming majority in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia and the overwhelming majority from preventable or treatable causes. Progress that was rapid through the 2000s and 2010s has slowed, and recent cuts to global health financing threaten reversal.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
98Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
76People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
45Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
5Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
28Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.