To commemorate its hundred anniversary Save the Children has published its third annual Global Childhood report. Overall the conditions of children regarding health, education, and safety are improving in 173 out of 176 countries, including Bangladesh. The number of children who are robbed of a childhood, because of mortality, malnutrition, child marriage, child labour, teenage motherhood, no schooling or living in conflict areas, has come down significantly from an estimated 980 million in 2000 to 690 million children.
The report points out Bangladesh’s successes in child healthcare, but also indicates more needs to be done, especially to reduce stunting and child marriage and motherhood. Bangladesh ranking remains low at 127 out of 178. While the country scores the highest reduction on child mortality under five with 63% decline in twenty years, the present data show this decline has slowed down significantly during the last few years. However, overall Bangladesh is on the right track. The improvements on stunting and child marriage have been better than suggested by the data in the report, as they figures used are collected some years back, some are from 2013. Therefor, one should check the tables at the end of the report to find out the source and year of data collection.
Read the report “Global Childhood Report 2019”.
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