Global health report
An annual report as a web page: a cover, numbered findings, figures with captions, footnotes and a methodology section. Print it, or save it as PDF from the browser: a print stylesheet drops the site's navigation, gives the cover its own page and keeps every figure whole.
Annual report · Edition 2026
Longer lives, fewer children lost
Life expectancy and child mortality across world regions, 1950–2024
- +26.8 yrs Global life expectancy at birth, from 46.4 in 1950 to 73.2 in 2023
- 3.7% of children die before age five, down from 24.7% in 19501
- 15.8 yrs The gap between Northern America and Africa, half the 30.9 years of 1950
- Coverage
- 6 regions, 1950–2024
- Sources
- UN WPP 2024, UN IGME
- Published
- October 2026
Executive summary
A child born in 2023 can expect to live 73 years, 27 years longer than one born in 1950. The gains were not a slow drift: they came fastest where the starting point was lowest. Asia added 32.6 years and Latin America 27, while Europe and Northern America, which started near 65, added 17 and 11.5.
The largest single driver is the collapse of child mortality. In 1950 one child in four died before their fifth birthday; in 2024 it was fewer than one in twenty-five. Africa still carries the heaviest burden at 6.6%, but it has cut its rate by 59% since 1990, almost exactly the world's pace of 60%.
Progress is not guaranteed. Global life expectancy fell by 1.7 years between 2019 and 2021 as COVID-19 spread2, the first sustained reversal since the famine years around 1960, before recovering to a new high in 2023.
Life expectancy
Every region gained, and the order barely changed: Northern America, Oceania and Europe still lead, Africa still trails. What changed is the spread. In 1950 the regions spanned 31 years; in 2023 they span 16, and five of the six now sit within five years of each other.
Child mortality
The panels share one vertical scale on purpose: it shows how far apart the regions still are. Europe's rate, 0.5%, is a thirteenth of Africa's. But on its own scale every line falls, and Asia's fall is the steepest, from 9.0% to 2.5% in 34 years.
Data tables
| Region | Life exp. 1950 | Life exp. 2023 | Under-5 1990 | Under-5 2024 |
|---|
Methodology
Life expectancy is period life expectancy at birth: the average number of years a newborn would live if the death rates of that year held for their whole life. Regional figures are the UN's population-weighted aggregates. Child mortality is the probability of dying between birth and exactly five years of age, shown as a percentage of live births.
- The 1950 figure comes from Gapminder and the UN's historical reconstruction; from 1990 the series is the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (IGME).
- Period life expectancy reacts to a single year's deaths, so a pandemic shows as a sharp dip that reverses once excess mortality falls. It is not a forecast of how long anyone born in 2021 will live.
How it's built
-
The cover is a
<header>with an ordered list of findings; CSS counters print the 01, 02, 03 above each number. - The slope chart spreads its end labels apart when two regions land within a few pixels, so Europe and Oceania, both 79.1 in 2023, stay readable.
- The small multiples are one function called seven times with a shared scale; a pointer over any panel moves the crosshair in all of them.
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The print stylesheet is an
@media printblock in the same<style>: it hides the site's chrome and this section, breaks after the cover and keeps figures on one page.
Sources: UN World Population Prospects 2024 and UN IGME, as compiled by Our World in Data's life expectancy and child mortality pages.
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