Africa’s extreme poor: Surviving early childhood

The chapter aims to provide a statistical orientation of different dimensions of extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), with a particular focus on young children – first-day deaths and under-5 mortality – complemented by an analysis of maternal mortality. For the period 1990–2015, child and maternal mortality trends reveal that those countries with lower poverty levels appear to have made the most progress; however, child well-being and maternal health have widened over the last two decades, with 12 of the 13 countries that have made no progress in achieving under-5 mortality target reduction from SSA. If you are born in SSA, then the probability that you will die before your fifth birthday is almost 17 times greater than if you are born in a developed country, and 397,000 babies born in SSA die on their first day of life.