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Child mortality rate

Long-run data – Gapminder; UN IGME
See all data and research on:
Child & Infant Mortality

What you should know about this indicator

  • This long-run indicator combines two data sources: Gapminder and the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME).
  • provides estimates of child mortality rates for the years 1800 to 2015. The full range of sources used can be found in .
  • The provides estimates of child mortality rates for some countries from 1932 onward.
  • For years where data from both sources is available, we prioritize the UN IGME data.
Child mortality rate
Long-run data – Gapminder; UN IGME
The long-run estimated share of newborns who die before reaching the age of five.
Source
Gapminder (2015); UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2025) – processed by
Last updated
April 25, 2025
Date range
1751–2023
Unit
deaths per 100 live births

Related research and writing

Featured image

Child mortality: an everyday tragedy of enormous scale that we can make progress against

Max Roser
Featured image

Children in rich countries are much less likely to die than a few decades ago, but we rarely hear about this progress

Hannah Ritchie

Explore charts that include this data

Child mortality rate vs. GDP per capita

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) was formed in 2004 to share data on child mortality, improve methods for child mortality estimation, report on progress towards child survival goals, and enhance country capacity to produce timely and properly assessed estimates of child mortality. The UN IGME is led by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and includes the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank Group and the United Nations Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs as full members.

UN IGME updates its child mortality estimates annually after reviewing newly available data and assessing data quality. The web portal contains the latest UN IGME estimates of child mortality at the country, regional and global levels, and the data used to derive them.

Retrieved on
March 25, 2025
Retrieved from
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by . To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2024).

Estimates of child mortality rate (under five years old) per 1,000 live births. This data has been compiled by Klara Johansson and Mattias Lindgren (Gapminder) from a selection of sources:

  • Human Mortality Database
  • Child Mortality Estimates from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.
  • Gapminder model based on infant mortality ratio (version 2)
  • Model estimates based on Gapminder's life expectancy data combined with model life tables, with some additional adjustments
Retrieved on
September 18, 2023
Retrieved from
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by . To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Gapminder, Child Mortality Rate, under age five, version 7.

builds and maintains a long-run dataset on population by country, region, and for the world, based on various sources.

You can find more information on these sources and how our time series is constructed on this page: /population-sources

Retrieved on
July 11, 2024
Retrieved from
/population-sources
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by . To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
The long-run data on population is based on various sources, described on this page: /population-sources

How we process data at

All data and visualizations on rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across .

Notes on our processing step for this indicator

This indicator is a combination of data from two sources:

  • Gapminder, which provides estimates of child mortality rates for the years 1800 to 2015.
  • The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), which provides estimates of child mortality rates, available for some countries from 1932 onward.

For years where data from both sources is available, we prioritize the UN IGME data.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by are completely open access under the . You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by , please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Child mortality rate”, part of the following publication: Saloni Dattani, Fiona Spooner, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser (2023) - “Child and Infant Mortality”. Data adapted from United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, Gapminder, Various sources. Retrieved from /grapher/child-mortality [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Gapminder (2015); UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2025) – processed by

Full citation

Gapminder (2015); UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2025) – processed by . “Child mortality rate – Gapminder; UN IGME – Long-run data” [dataset]. United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, “United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation”; Gapminder, “Child mortality rate under age five v7”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved April 28, 2025 from /grapher/child-mortality