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Under-five mortality rate

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

What you should know about this indicator

  • This long-run indicator is a combination of two data sources, Gapminder and the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME).
  • The historical data is compiled by Gapminder, the full range of sources used can be found in the Gapminder documentation.

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’s independent Technical Advisory Group (TAG), comprised of leading academic scholars and independent experts in demography and biostatistics, provides guidance on estimation methods, technical issues, and strategies for data analysis and data quality assessment.

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.

Details on the methods used to estimate child mortality are available here: https://childmortality.org/methods.

Under-five mortality rate Long-run data – UN IGME; Gapminder
The long-run estimated share of who die before reaching the age of five.
Source
United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2023); Gapminder (2015) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
September 19, 2023
Next expected update
September 2024
Date range
1751–2021
Unit
deaths per 100 live births
Links
https://childmortality.org/data

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2023)

Data published by

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), Levels & Trends in Child Mortality: Report 2022, Estimates developed by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, United Nations Children’s Fund, New York, 2023.

Retrieved on
August 16, 2023
Retrieved from
https://childmortality.org/data

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) https://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd002/
  • 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
https://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd005/
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Compiled and documented by Klara Johansson and Mattias Lindgren from Gapminder from many sources including: Human Mortality Database; UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation; Gapminder models based on life expectancy; Gapminder models based on infant mortality rates.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data 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 Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

This indicator is a combination of data from two sources:

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

We combine the two datasets, for years where both are available, we have a preference for the UN IGME data.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data 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 Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. 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 Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Under-five mortality rate”, part of the following publication: Saloni Dattani, Fiona Spooner, Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2023) - “Child and Infant Mortality”. Data adapted from Gapminder. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/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:

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2023); Gapminder (2015) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2023); Gapminder (2015) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Under-five mortality rate – UN IGME; Gapminder – Long-run data” [dataset]. Gapminder, “Child mortality rate under age five v7” [original data]. Retrieved July 8, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality