Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy, is projected to overtake India by year 2021 as the country with the most under-five deaths in the world, the World Bank has said.
Currently, 107 out of 1000 or nearly 11 percent of children born in Nigeria die before they are five years old, according to a report by the Bank.
The report titled “Investing in human capital for Nigeria’s future” stated that children dying early is not only a tragic loss for families and societies, but also associated with enormous economic and social cost.
It said that child mortality rate in Nigeria “is among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa thus among the highest in the world.” The rate is also uneven both across states and income groups, the Bank explained, adding that death among children aged between one and five years “is eight times higher among the poor than the rich.”
The report added that child mortality decreases with high vaccination coverage rates, but explained that they vary significantly across states and regions and that these have changed little in Nigeria over the last 25 years. “This is in sharp contrast with other countries in West Africa such as Cameroon, Ghana, or Senegal, which have made more rapid progress on immunization even though they started from higher levels of coverage,” the report noted.
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Health practitioners in Nigeria say they are not surprised by this forecast due to the deteriorating state of the healthcare industry in the country. Doyin Odubanjo, Chairman, Association of Public Health Physicians of Nigeria, Lagos Chapter, blames this on not only inadequate budget for the sector, but also poor implementation of the budgets.
“Until the investments that we plan to do begin to materialise, we will still be lacking in improving our health sector,” he said.
The report said that India, the largest country in the South Asia Region, is improving on its target of reducing under-five deaths. Under-five deaths have been historically high in India, but government’s determination to stamp it out has led to a steep decline in the mortality rate.
In 2016, India doubled the rate of decline, reducing it for the first time below one million under-five deaths in a year, with as much as 120,000, a government report said.
Under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, which succeeded the Millennium Development Goals, the third goal aims at reducing under-five mortality to as low as 25 per 1,000 live births.
Bunmi Bailey& Anthonia Obokoha
