Our World
in Data
Data

Under-fifteen mortality rate

See all data and research on:
Child & Infant Mortality

About this data

Under-fifteen mortality rate
Estimated share of children that die before reaching the age of fifteen.
Source
United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2018; 2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
September 11, 2024
Date range
1950–2022
Unit
deaths per 100 live births

Related research and writing

Thumbnail for article on decline in child mortality

Mortality in the past: every second child died

Max Roser

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2018; 2024)

Data published by

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2018; 2024)

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).

The 2018 vintages of UN IGME's child mortality estimates. This has greater temporal coverage of many of the variables, including 5-14 years mortality rate which is necessary for calculating the under-fifteen mortality rate.

Retrieved on
June 30, 2022
Retrieved from
https://childmortality.org/
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 (UN IGME), Levels & Trends in Child Mortality: Report 2018, Estimates developed by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, United Nations Children’s Fund, New York, 2018.

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
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

This indicator is processed by OWID based on the original data source. It is a combination of the under-five mortality rate and the 5-14 mortality rate.

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-fifteen 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, UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, Various sources. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/youth-mortality-rate [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 (2018; 2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2018; 2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Under-fifteen mortality rate” [dataset]. United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, “United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation”; UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, “Child Mortality Estimates 2018”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved November 26, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/youth-mortality-rate