These days we are knowing many facts about child survival in the world. And is that Save The Children has presented the report 'Child Survival Map: the best and worst countries to be born', in an attempt to draw attention to this global scourge that affects children around the world.
According Save the Children, the best country to be born is Sweden and the worst is Somalia, from a list of 168 countries. The contrast between these two extremes is shocking.
Virtually all Swedish children enjoy good health and education, with only three deaths per thousand children. As we see, the Nordic countries usually top the lists of well-being, since the best place to be a mother is Norway.
In contrast, in Somalia, one in six children loses their lives before their fifth birthday, 36% suffer from malnutrition, 70% do not have access to drinking water and only one in three school-age children attend class .
Regarding Spain, what position do you occupy in this list? Spain ranks 12th, a very privileged position, given the panorama that is observed. We have already seen that in terms of the best places to be a mother, this country was also in 12th place, since both concepts are closely related. In Spain there are four deaths per thousand children.
Child Survival Map: the best and worst countries to be born
Others data that this report reveals from Save the Children:
- More than 8 million children under the age of five lose their lives every year (about 22,000 deaths of children a day).
- 99% of these deaths occur in impoverished or developing countries, half of them belonging to sub-Saharan Africa.
- 40% of deaths among children under five years of age occur in the first month of life.
- 48 million women, one in three, gives birth every year without midwife assistance and two million completely alone.
- More than one million mothers and newborns die each year from birth complications easily preventable, given the shortage of qualified professional care. We already saw it when we told you that midwives are missing in the world.
- At the bottom of the list are countries such as Afghanistan, Niger, Chad, Sierra Leone, Mali ..., almost all belonging to Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Some 40 million children from these countries do not have basic health access and suffer serious failures in their education.
- In Eritrea only half of the children attend classes. Worse figures show Djibouti or New Guinea, where this figure drops to 45%.
- One in seven children lives in what Save The Children has defined as 'sanitary desert', that is, in places where access to health services is virtually nil, there are no vaccines or treatment for diarrhea, the main causes of infant mortality.
- 23 million children do not have access to basic vaccines.
- Only by vaccinating 90% of children in the most disadvantaged countries, two million lives could be saved per year.
- It takes three and a half million health workers, including 350,000 midwives. In Sierra Leone, for example, they lack 11,000 nurses, midwives and doctors.
- Maternal and child health assistance reaches only one third of what is needed. About 17 and a half billion dollars are needed, the equivalent of a quarter of what Europeans spend on cosmetics every year.
The Save the Children campaign “We All Count” pursues reduce child mortality of children under five, a struggle that involves getting more and more the best countries to be born, and that there are no places where pregnancy, childbirth or childhood pose such a high risk.
