In March, the United Nations (UN) Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation released their 2023 report which contains data on trends in child mortality in all countries and regions from 1990 through to 2022.1 This is a very important document. The report includes mortality estimates in neonates, infants and children under 5 years, and a strong focus on school-aged children, adolescents and young people in the age categories 5–14 and 14–24 years. This is an advance on UN reports prior to 2017, which focused only on children under 5 years.

The 2023 report documents the substantial progress from 1990 to 2010, and from 2010 to 2022, and outlines the distance countries are from the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). This is timely, coming after 3–4 years when the energy for the SDGs has fallen away.

The report highlights a global health landmark reached in 2022 of less than 5 million deaths in children under 5 in a year (4.9 million; CI 4.6 to 5.4 million), an unacceptable figure given the high number of preventable deaths in this 5 million, but about half of the estimated number of deaths in 2000 (10.8 million). In 2022, the report estimates there were 2.3 (2.2–2.6) million deaths in the neonatal period, 2.6 (2.4–2.9) million deaths among children aged 1–59 months, and 2.1 (2.0–2.3) million deaths among those aged 5–24 years, including 0.9 (0.9–1.0) million deaths among adolescents aged 10–19 years.

Globally, there has been recent slowing of …