Child mortality rate Drops: UNICEF

• The number of children dying under the age of five has fallen by one third over the past two decades, the UNICEF has said.
• Between 1990 and 2009, the number of children below the age of five who died annually fell from 12.4 million to 8.1 million.
• The global under-five mortality rate dipped from 89 deaths per 1,000 live births to 60 during that period.
• Some 22,000 children under the age of five continue to die every day, with 70 per cent of these deaths occurring within their first year of life.
• Under-five mortality increasingly becoming concentrated in a few countries, with half of all deaths of children below five occurring in just five countries in 2009: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Pakistan and China.
• Sub-Saharan Africa - where one in eight children do not live to see their fifth birthday - continues to be home to the highest rates of child mortality
• UNICEF cautioned that although the pace of decline of child mortality has picked up in the past decade, it is still not enough to meet the MDG target of a two-thirds decline between 1990 and 2015.

The new figures were published in this year's Levels & Trends in Child Mortality, issued by the U.N. Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, bringing together several U.N. entities.