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The Development Goals Of The United Nation 's Children Fund

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Summary
Every single day, Nigeria loses about 2,300 under-five year olds ranking the country as the second largest contributor to the under–five in the world. United Nation’s Children Fund (UNICEF) reports that “although analyses of recent trends show that the country is making progress in cutting down infant and under-five mortality rates, the pace still remains too slow to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reducing child mortality by a third by 2015”, but that “the tragedy behind this slow pace of progress in child survival is that two-thirds of the under-five deaths could be avoided, since life-saving interventions are well known and can be implemented on a large scale, even in settings where resources are constrained”. …show more content…

It is however highly recommended that a strong positive behavioral change and attitude be inculcated into the citizens to ensure effective acceptability, implementation and sustainability of the strategy towards achieving its desired goals, else significant progress might not be recorded in efforts directed at achieving reduction in under-five mortality rate by two-thirds in another 5 years post MDGs dateline. Overview and root causes of these high under-five mortality rates in Nigeria
Since the millennium declaration, Nigeria and many other countries are not on track to attaining the targets for reducing child mortality and improving maternal health. (WHO) let alone sustaining it after 2015. About 1 million children under the age of 5years die every year. That translates into 114 deaths every hour. Report states that, “One out of every four of these deaths (about 250,000) is of a newborn—a baby less than one month old”. (UNFPA, 2011)
There are effective interventions to significantly reduce child mortality and improve maternal mortality but the problem is that they are not delivered to the populations in need at the right time and with enough coverage. (IMNCH, 2007)
Despite the GIVS intervention, Nigeria was noted in 2011 to be among the top three countries which made up more than half of all incompletely vaccinated children of the 194 WHO member states. (Global routine vaccination

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