Global Under-5 Mortality — 2024 Picture

The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) — comprising UNICEF, WHO, World Bank and UN Population Division — released its definitive Levels & Trends in Child Mortality report in March 2026. These are the headline global findings for 2024.

Nigeria's Under-5 Mortality Rate: 1990–2024

Nigeria's U5MR has fallen from 213 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 115 in 2024 — a 46% decline over 34 years. But the pace of decline has slowed dramatically since 2015, and Nigeria remains far from the SDG 2030 target of 25 per 1,000.

Under-5 Mortality Rate per 1,000 Live Births — Nigeria (1990–2024) Per 1,000 live births · UN IGME

Sources: UN IGME Levels & Trends in Child Mortality 2024 · NDHS 2018 & 2024 · WHO · SDG target = 25 per 1,000 live births by 2030

Nigeria: World's Highest Under-5 Mortality — The Hard Numbers

Nigeria is the country where the most children under 5 die every year, both in terms of rate and absolute numbers. Understanding the scale of this crisis — and where progress has been made — is the starting point for change.

What Kills Nigerian Children Under 5 — Causes Infographic

Every single one of these causes is preventable or treatable. The tragedy of Nigerian child mortality is not that we lack solutions — it is that these proven, affordable solutions are not reaching the children who need them.

Nigeria vs the World — Under-5 Mortality Rate (2024)

Nigeria's 115 deaths per 1,000 live births is 4.6 times the global average and 11.5 times the rate in high-income countries. The comparison below shows how far Nigeria is from where it needs to be.

Progress That Cannot Be Ignored — But Is Not Enough

Nigeria has made real progress on child survival over three decades. The challenge now is that progress has slowed at the exact moment it needs to accelerate to meet SDG 2030 targets.

Nigeria's Child Mortality Crisis Is Concentrated in the North

The gap between Nigeria's best and worst-performing states for child survival is wider than the gap between many countries. This geographic inequality is the most urgent dimension of the crisis.

Key Statistics at a Glance

Historical Timeline — Nigeria's Child Survival Story

What Must Change — Proven Interventions

Every one of the top killers of Nigerian children has a proven, affordable solution. The problem is not the absence of knowledge — it is the absence of scale, consistency, and equity in delivering these interventions to every child.

What the Data Tells Us

• 1
  Nigeria leads the world in child mortality — and one child dies every 45 seconds. With 115 deaths per 1,000 live births and an estimated 700,000 under-5 deaths per year, Nigeria has the worst under-5 mortality rate of any country on earth in 2024. One Nigerian child dies every 45 seconds — more than any other country. Most of these deaths are preventable with interventions that cost just a few dollars per child. (UN IGME / Economy Post, March 2026)
• 2
  Real progress has been made — but it has slowed at the worst possible time. Nigeria's U5MR has fallen from 213 in 1990 to 115 in 2024 — a 46% reduction in 34 years that has saved millions of lives. But since 2015, the annual rate of improvement has more than halved. With the SDG 2030 target of 25 per 1,000 requiring a further 78% reduction in just 6 years, at current pace Nigeria will miss the target by a catastrophic margin. (UN IGME 2024 · NDHS 2024)
• 3
  The neonatal mortality crisis is the hardest nut to crack — and the most urgent. The NMR of 41 per 1,000 in 2024 NDHS is virtually unchanged from 39 in 2018 — meaning 6 years of intervention have barely moved the needle on neonatal survival. Nearly half of all under-5 deaths occur in the first 28 days of life. Without dramatically improving care at birth and in the first week of life — skilled attendance, kangaroo mother care, newborn resuscitation — overall U5MR cannot fall fast enough. (FMOH NDHS 2024)
• 4
  31% of Nigerian children have received zero vaccines — the most shocking data point in the NDHS 2024. Nigeria's zero-dose crisis is the most actionable emergency. 31% of children aged 12–23 months have never received a single vaccine — leaving nearly 1 in 3 Nigerian children completely unprotected against vaccine-preventable killers like measles, whooping cough, and pneumococcal disease. Closing the zero-dose gap alone could prevent tens of thousands of deaths annually at minimal cost. (NDHS 2024 · FMOH Nigeria, October 2025)
• 5
  The geography of child death in Nigeria is a story of extreme inequality. A child born in Zamfara has a roughly 1 in 5 chance of dying before age 5 — the same as Nigeria's national average in 1990. A child born in Kwara has a roughly 1 in 22 chance. This 5-fold gap within one country shows that the solutions work where they are applied — the urgent task is applying them equitably across all 36 states and especially the North-West and North-East zones. (MICS 2016–17 · PMC)

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