Under-Five Mortality: South Africa

## What this measures

How many children die before their fifth birthday for every 1,000 born alive, for South Africa. Yearly from 1974.

## Why it matters

It is one of the clearest measures of whether living conditions are improving: it moves with clean water, vaccines, nutrition, medical care and income.

## How to read it

Lower is better. Annual, dated December 31 of the reference year.

## What it does not say

These are modelled estimates from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, built from surveys and civil registration of uneven quality, and they are revised as new data arrive. Recent years in countries without vital registration rest on projections.

## Source

UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UNICEF, WHO, World Bank, UN DESA Population Division), via World Bank World Development Indicators, indicator `SH.DYN.MORT`. Licence per the World Bank's indicator metadata: CC BY 4.0. Palanor reads it each month (/api/cron/worldbank-sync) and rewrites the history, so revisions carry through.