Our World
in Data
It’s Giving Season. Help us do more with a donation.
Data

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.
Under-five mortality rate
Long-run data – UN IGME; Gapminder
The fertility rate (average number of children per woman) multiplied by the under-five mortality rate (probability of dying before age five).
Source
United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
September 22, 2023
Date range
1800–2022
Unit
under-five deaths per woman

Related research and writing

How often did parents see their children die?

Max Roser

Explore charts that include this data

Children per woman that survived childhood vs. those that died in childhood

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
September 11, 2024
Retrieved from
https://childmortality.org/all-cause-mortality/data
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.
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) 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.

World Population Prospects 2022 is the 27th edition of the official estimates and projections of the global population that have been published by the United Nations since 1951. The estimates are based on all available sources of data on population size and levels of fertility, mortality and international migration for 237 countries or areas. More details at https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/.

Retrieved on
September 9, 2022
Retrieved from
https://population.un.org/wpp/Download/
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.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2022). World Population Prospects 2022, Online Edition.

Sources:

— 1800 to 1950 (and in some cases also years after 1950): Gapminder v6 which were compiled and documented by Mattias Lindgren, see previous versions further down on this page.

— 1950 to 2014: In most cases we use the latest UN estimates from World Population Prospects 2017 published in the file with Annually interpolated demographic indicators, called WPP2017_INT_F01_ANNUAL_DEMOGRAPHIC_INDICATORS.xlsx , accessed on September 2, 2017.

— 2015 – 2099: We use the UN forecast of future fertility rate in all countries, called median fertility variant.

Retrieved on
September 22, 2023
Retrieved from
https://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd008/
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.
Free data from www.gapminder.org

Our World in Data 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: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

Retrieved on
July 11, 2024
Retrieved from
https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources
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.
The long-run data on population is based on various sources, described on this page: https://ourworldindata.org/population-sources

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

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 United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, Gapminder, United Nations, Various sources. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-died-before-five-per-woman [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 (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Under-five mortality rate – UN IGME; Gapminder – 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”; United Nations, “World Population Prospects”; Gapminder, “Babies per woman (total fertility rate) v12”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved December 12, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-died-before-five-per-woman