Infant mortality in Zambia was 56 deaths per 1,000 in 2012, with an under-five mortality rate of 89 deaths per 1,000 live births. As shown in Graph 1, there has been a decline in the under-five mortality rate since 1990. Although this decline is encouraging, the under-five mortality rate is not yet in line with the country’s target of 64 deaths per 1,000 live births, as defined by Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG 4). In 2010, the three most prominent known causes of death for children below the age of five years were pneumonia (14 per cent), prematurity (13 per cent) and malaria (13 per cent). Other contributory causes were HIV/AIDS (11 per cent), diarrhoea and birth asphyxia (both nine per cent). In the period 2007-11 Zambia had a reported maternal mortality ratio of 590 deaths per 100,000 live births (this figure was estimated at 440 by UN agencies/World Bank in 2010).
